Supercharge Your SAP CAP Development with Cursor AI

Supercharge your CAP Development with Cursor AI: A Developer-Friendly Alternative to Joule

Looking to enhance your SAP BAS development workflow without relying (or paying) for SAP Joule? In this article I’ll share how you can connect “external” LLMs into your SAP Business Application Studio environment - and help you generate those overly complex annotation files for Fiori Elements and get explanations to code from sample repositories.

Cursor AI connecting to BAS

What is Cursor AI anyway?

Cursor AI is an intelligent coding assistant and IDE that combines large language models with traditional development tools. It offers code completion, explanation, and refactoring while maintaining a familiar VS Code-like interface that developers love. Unlike GitHub Copilot, it provides a richer development experience with additional tools for controlling the development process.

Why not just use SAP Joule?

Joule's functionality is limited within a BAS trial account or SAP Build Code service—it's only available in the AWS Virginia Data Center (US10), with capped usage. Joule works through specific commands for distinct tasks, such as generating CDS entities or adding application logic.

Example of Joule in Context

This discovery center mission shows how to build a CAP application using Joule. https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/build-code-test-drive.html

Installing Cursor AI and Extensions

Here's how to leverage Cursor AI as a powerful alternative LLM for your development environment—getting you up and running quickly, even with a trial account.

The setup is straightforward and requires just a few prerequisites:

• Install Cursor AI (the free version works fine) and the Remote Access for SAP Business Application Studio extension.
• Set up a Business Application Studio dev space (a free trial works fine).
• Use Chrome browser with the Tampermonkey extension installed—this lets you add custom scripts that modify how websites work (Thank you to Marian Zeis for providing this gist)

Let's set up a sample CAP project in BAS first

In SAP Build Lobby, create a new application by cloning this git repository: https://github.com/SAP-samples/cap-sflight

What can you do with Cursor? 

Cursor AI offers Chat and Composer as two distinct AI features designed for different coding tasks:

• Chat is like having a helpful coding assistant for specific questions and code analysis within the context of the current file. Use it for quick help on your current file
• Composer is a more powerful tool for larger-scale code generation and editing tasks across your entire project. Use this when you need to make changes across your CAP codebase.

Now you can ask questions about the project and get coding recommendations:

Composer providing insight into CAP project

Applying Code Changes

Here is an example of a prompt to adjust the entity structure, with the result of what it will change in the project files:

Code Change Suggestions

When you issue a command like CDS watch, toggle back to your BAS (browser session) and open the link from there to get a preview of your changes (it is not possible to run that locally).

It is also possible to change the LLM that Cursor uses, we have added our own API keys from the LLM providers in Cursor settings.

Final Comments

Like all AI tools you need to be careful with the suggestions, I would suggest regularly committing changes via GIT so you can easily roll back when the coding starts going in the wrong direction.

Happy coding from the team at VMG Labs.