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AI needs a foundation: A map of the plug-in ecosystem for CAP
A map of the plug-ins for CAP (@sap/cds@sap/cdsThe CAP Node.js runtime, which compiles the CDS model, serves the services declared in it, answers generic requests before any handler runs, and loads every cds-plugin.sap official, cap), official, community and independent, drawn across regions such as integration, performance and tooling, so that a team can see what exists to reuse and what it would have to build: the question plugin authoringPlugin authoringWriting a package that extends a framework or runtime rather than an application that uses it — a reusable extension loaded by its host, and the question you arrive at once solving a problem twice makes you want to solve it once for everyone.SAP only answers from the other side. SAP's abstract places CAP at the centre of its AI strategy, with model context protocol support, and the map is offered as the foundation under that. A TechEd 2026 session (Tuesday 27 October, Community Theater, Berlin), presented by Mike ZaschkaMike Zaschkamaintains 6 entries, created 12 pieces, contributed to 9 entriesindependent, written here from SAP's abstract; the recording is not yet published.
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Plugin authoringCAPPlugin authoringWriting a package that extends a framework or runtime rather than an application that uses it — a reusable extension loaded by its host, and the question you arrive at once solving a problem twice makes you want to solve it once for everyone.@sap/cdsCAP@sap/cdsThe CAP Node.js runtime, which compiles the CDS model, serves the services declared in it, answers generic requests before any handler runs, and loads every cds-plugin.
Since then
No major release of @sap/cds since this was published
Who is behind it
Mike ZaschkaMike ZaschkaWrote this
In the atlas: maintains 6, contributes to 9, wrote 12@mikezaschkaauthor
In the atlas: maintains 6, contributes to 9, wrote 12@mikezaschkaauthor
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Group by33 of 33 pieces
Piece, what it offersStill applies
What's in Daniel Hutzel's brain?What's in Daniel Hutzel's brain?A Devtoberfest 2026 session in the building-apps track, in which Daniel Hutzel and DJ Adams work through what the CAP team is building for agents. A bookshop gets an MCP endpoint beside its OData one from a single annotation, with the plugin writing the coding agent's configuration itself; in the xt-travels sample five services that know nothing about each other are served over MCP and an agent does the orchestration the hand-built UI and its value helps used to do. Hutzel then annotates a service as an agent so the ReAct loop and the choice of model move into the CAP service, and finally drops MCP for a skill that teaches the agent CQL instead, which is where the edges to Serve your application over MCP, Agent tooling and Agent guidance come from. The mechanism under all of it, a plugin file in the package root and event handlers that can be added to any CAP service, is the edge to Plugin authoring.published 2026-10-02
DRY CAP – Making Sustainable Solutions Through PluginsDRY CAP – Making Sustainable Solutions Through PluginsA Devtoberfest 2026 building-apps session on packaging the things you would otherwise write twice, from in-house API clients and shared data models to validation logic, as a CAP plugin. The presenter builds one live: a cds-plugin.js next to package.json is what makes CAP notice the plugin at all, an index.cds carries a reusable user context and service that the consuming application projects into its own and protects there, and the plugin registers an Express middleware at a chosen step of the bootstrap to put user properties on the request. A feature-flagging plugin his team already uses closes it, and the whole walkthrough is the edge to Plugin authoring.SAP Developers, published 2026-10-02
CAP: The Road Ahead - Simplicity in an AI EraCAP: The Road Ahead - Simplicity in an AI EraDevtoberfest 2026 session CAP10, from the head of SAP's Cloud Application Programming Model: forty minutes of live building rather than slides, on the argument that the cheapest code in an AI project is code nobody has to generate. Claude Code builds an invoice-matching workspace from cds init onwards, and each step is one the framework answers rather than the agent: a 42-line domain model that @sap/cds serves as OData and Fiori elements with a status flow, data privacy and change-tracking annotations that produce audit log entries in the console and would reach the SAP Audit Log service once deployed, an imported S/4HANA supplier data product, and semantic matching from a local embedding model after @cap-js/ai is added. The last three steps are annotations: @mcp beside @odata turns the service into an MCP server that a second Claude session queries through @cap-js/mcp, an agent annotation adds the A2A protocol with an agent card and an audit log entry for the agent task, and a skill file gives the agent the matching policy.SAP Developers, published 2026-09-25
Hello React & Vue : SAP CAP’s New UI Layer is Here!Hello React & Vue : SAP CAP’s New UI Layer is Here!CAP gaining a UI layer for React and Vue, which changes the default assumption that the front end is UI5. Short, and the significance is larger than the length.Yogananda, published 2026-06-25
CAP Developers - Call to Action to mitigate and Apply Solution provided in SAP Note 3747787CAP Developers - Call to Action to mitigate and Apply Solution provided in SAP Note 3747787Four malicious npm package versions published on 29 April 2026 that exfiltrate credentials and propagate into adjacent repositories, and what a CAP developer should check. A security advisory rather than a technique, and dated precisely for that reason.Yogananda, published 2026-05-01
CAP, RAP, or Both: Stop Hiding Behind 'It Depends'CAP, RAP, or Both: Stop Hiding Behind 'It Depends'Opens by refusing the answer every other post on this gives — "both are complementary, choose based on context" — and then commits to a framework, including the parts usually left out: the staffing bias behind the decision, and what to do about a landscape with thousands of Z-objects. Argument, not tutorial.published 2026-04-09
What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – January 2026What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – January 2026December and January together: the new @assert feature, revised documentation, CDS editor work, and Kyma deployment additions.published 2026-02-09
CAP Heaven? Not Yet — But You Can See It from HereCAP Heaven? Not Yet — But You Can See It from HereAn assessment from someone with Java, Azure and AWS behind them as well as ABAP and Fiori, which is a rarer vantage point than it sounds. The title is the verdict.published 2026-02-07
Declarative Programming in CAP: Less Code, More ValueDeclarative Programming in CAP: Less Code, More ValueAn argument for annotations over handlers, made from the case where it is most obvious: repetitive validation logic that could be declared instead of written. Describes what you want rather than how to get it, and lets the runtime decide the how.published 2026-02-05
What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – November 2025What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – November 2025The November edition, led by the Status Transition Flows feature presented at reCAP 2025.published 2025-12-08
What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – September 2025What's new in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model – September 2025The monthly release communication for CAP itself, and this edition carries the MCP servers and the Application Frontend Service integration. Kept because a dated list of what shipped when is the only record of that; three editions are indexed here rather than the whole run.published 2025-10-14
Create your first CAP pluginCreate your first CAP pluginA step-by-step guide to the cds-plugin.js extension point: scaffold a package, add an index.cds for shared model artifacts, and test it locally against a throwaway CAP project before publishing to npm, with a separate section on building the same plugin in TypeScript and compiling it with tsc. Points to the author's own cds-plugin-handlers and ui5-cap-serverside-rendering-plugin as worked examples.published 2024-12-09
Don't "let it crash", is this the new CAP guideline?Don't "let it crash", is this the new CAP guideline?Dinu traces a change in error handling in CAP's Node.js runtime: @sap/cds@8.2.0 adds a cds.server.shutdown_on_uncaught_errors config flag, defaulting to true, but invoking an operation with an undefined variable no longer takes the server down, with or without the flag, where the same code crashed it on cds@6 and cds@7, and the author notes the old behaviour was already missing in cds@8.1. It still crashes with features.odata_new_adapter turned off to use the old OData parser, so it is the new OData adapter, like the REST adapter before it, that answers an uncaught error with a 500 instead of taking the process down.Dinu, published 2024-09-06
SAP AI Services - DOX - Gen AI with SAP CAP Plugin - Part 3SAP AI Services - DOX - Gen AI with SAP CAP Plugin - Part 3Building on Reusable components for CAP with cds-plugin by Daniel Schlachter, this part walks through a custom CAP plugin — a cds-plugin.js plus a lib_cap_dox.js helper — that authenticates against SAP's Document Information Extraction (DOX) service and calls its schema and job-status APIs to fill an entity from extracted document fields. It covers reading the service key from Cloud Foundry (cf service-key) for the OAuth token endpoint, and dynamically mapping DOX's header and line-item output onto CAP entity properties.sabarna17, published 2024-06-11
SAP CAPv7 - Node.js Highlights and ExperiencesSAP CAPv7 - Node.js Highlights and ExperiencesAn account of upgrading a 100+ table CAP Node.js project from v6 to v7, working through breaking changes in @sap/cds 7: event handlers now always receive an array, service paths move under /odata/v4/... unless serve_on_root is set, and cds-serve replaces cds run. It goes deepest on the GraphQL plugin, @cap-js/graphql: the /graphql endpoint it serves, Composition results wrapped in a nodes connection, and offset-based pagination reached through OData's top and skip rather than GraphQL's own limit and offset.published 2023-08-03
How to build reusable plugin components for CAP Java applicationsHow to build reusable plugin components for CAP Java applicationsA companion to Daniel Schlachter's Reusable components for CAP with cds-plugin, showing the same mechanism on CAP Java: a plugin ships as its own Maven artifact with an event handler and a CdsRuntimeConfiguration implementation, registered through the JDK's ServiceLoader rather than any CAP-specific wiring. The walkthrough builds a cds-emoji-plugin-java jar that decorates @emoji-annotated fields on read, installs it to the local Maven repository, and adds it as a runtime dependency to a cds init --add java bookshop application. It argues the plugin mechanism was not new to CAP Java, just previously undocumented.robinjayasinghe, published 2023-05-16
BTP CAP : Custom plugin to separate generic change log capture logicBTP CAP : Custom plugin to separate generic change log capture logicWalks through building a custom [CAP](ecosystem:cap) plugin that centralises change-log capture: on cds.once('served') it collects entities annotated @audit, then hooks srv.before('UPDATE') to read the existing record, diff it field by field against the incoming payload, and record old/new values with the user and timestamp. It also documents a cds build failure packaging the plugin's own directory into gen/srv for MTA deployment, fixed by adding it as a copyfiles build-parameter step in mta.yaml.sreehari_vpillai, published 2023-05-10
Reusable components for CAP with cds-pluginReusable components for CAP with cds-pluginThe post that taught the mechanism, and it teaches it by picking a requirement small enough to be absurd: every string a service returns should end in a random emoji. Working through that on the bookshop example leaves nothing to argue about except the plumbing, which is the point — what a cds-plugin is, where it hooks in, and why packaging it beats copying it into the next project. Vinícius Barrionuevo credits this post as the thing that gave him the idea for sap-cap-sdm-plugin, and it is hard to read the plugin ecosystem in this graph without it.published 2023-04-30
Getting started with cds.ql in NodeJS for CAP - 101 on how to query dataGetting started with cds.ql in NodeJS for CAP - 101 on how to query dataWalks through cds.ql, the query API @sap/cds gives a Node.js CAP service's custom handlers, with worked SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT examples against a sample schema — filters, AND/OR conditions, column projections, ordering, limiting, grouping and joining two entities through a schema view. An added correction notes that cds.tx(req) is no longer needed to run a query in newer CAP versions, contradicting the post's own original guidance.published 2022-06-21
CAP is important because it's not importantCAP is important because it's not importantAn essay rather than a technique: what CAP actually is, what it gives you, and the case for treating it as foundational precisely because it is not the interesting part of an application. Written in 2019, when that argument still had to be made, and the title is the argument. Also recorded as a Tech Aloud podcast episode and a CodeTalk, both linked from the post.published 2019-11-06
SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) - start hereSAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) - start hereThe orientation post for CAP, published in 2018 and revised in 2020 and again in 2021 with help credited to Iwona Hahn — which is the unusual part: a starting-point index that was maintained rather than left to rot, and says so at the top. Read as the shape of what a newcomer was pointed at, and as a marker of how much of that changed inside three years.published 2018-10-10
Everything new: Try out the latest features in CAPEverything new: Try out the latest features in CAPCAP (@sap/cds) gains the features this hands-on session works through: declarative constraints, which is the input validation concern, status flows as status transition flows, a cds REPL, extensibility through @sap/cds-oyster, and HCQL, which SAP's abstract calls CAP's native query-over-HTTP protocol, after an opening stretch of AI-driven app development. The abstract names the features and stops there; what each one does is not described. A TechEd 2026 hands-on session (Wednesday 28 October, Berlin), presented by Daniel Hutzel, Daniel Schlachter, Marc Huber and Tim Back, written here from SAP's abstract; the recording is not yet published.
Federating, Replicating, and Caching Remote Data in CAP — Part 2Federating, Replicating, and Caching Remote Data in CAP — Part 2The practical half of the pair. Where Part 1 sets out the terminology, what CAP does out of the box and where the gaps are, this one builds a small application that federates, replicates and caches remote data, one step at a time, with the finished project published as sales-cockpit so a reader can either follow along or start from the end. It began as a twenty-minute reCAP talk, which the author says was only room for the intro.published 2026-07-17
CAP just got faster: What's new in cds-caching 1.0CAP just got faster: What's new in cds-caching 1.0What changed in cds-caching at 1.0, announced at reCAP 2025 by the plugin's own maintainer. The substantive change is the read-through API: cache.rt.run(), send(), exec() and wrap() replace the bare cache.run() and cache.send(), and each returns the cache key and hit-or-miss metadata beside the result rather than the value alone. The second is quieter and easier to miss on an upgrade: user, tenant and locale stopped being folded into request-based cache keys by default and became opt-in through keyManagement, or per operation through a key template. Both of those still describe 3.x. What does not is the second half of the post: the metrics configuration it shows was reshaped at 2.0 and the statistics and dashboard settings were removed at 3.0, so take the monitoring and dashboard sections from the README instead. Read it as the successor to the introduction post, which still shows the deprecated calls.published 2025-07-15
CAP just got faster: What's new in cds-caching 1.0
cds-caching 1.0, now 3.1.1, cds 9, maintenance until 2027-06. Affects A reference.
Boosting performance in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) applications with cds-cachingBoosting performance in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) applications with cds-cachingThe plugin's introduction post: what cds-caching is for, how it is put together and the cases it was written against. The edge holds because the plugin's README still points here as the piece to read first, so this is where a reader arriving at the plugin is sent. It predates version 1.0 and the API has moved since: the read-through calls it shows as cache.run() and cache.send() are the ones the README now lists as deprecated in favour of cache.rt.*, which returns the cache key and hit/miss metadata alongside the result, and 1.0 made user, tenant and locale awareness opt-in under keyManagement rather than folding them into request-based keys by default. Metrics and monitoring, the OData API and full TypeScript definitions arrived with 1.0 and are described in CAP just got faster: What's new in cds-caching 1.0 instead. The reasoning about when a CAP service wants a cache still reads true; the call sites need translating.published 2025-06-25
Boosting performance in SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) applications with cds-caching
cds 9, maintenance until 2027-06, cds-caching 0.x, now 3.1.1. Affects A recipe.
Using Apache Kafka for messaging in the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) – Part 2/2Using Apache Kafka for messaging in the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) – Part 2/2The practical half: concrete use cases for cds-kafka, running locally and on BTP. It opens by placing the plugin among SAP's own event-driven offerings rather than beside them, which is the part that decides whether you reach for this or for Event Mesh — a comparison a plugin's own README rarely makes about itself.published 2025-01-13
Using Apache Kafka for messaging in the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) – Part 1/2Using Apache Kafka for messaging in the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) – Part 1/2The theory half of a pair introducing cds-kafka: what the plugin is for and what it can do, with event-driven architecture set up as the reason rather than assumed. Nothing is deployed here — the running application is part two — so this is the post to read if the question is whether Kafka belongs in the picture at all rather than how to wire it.published 2025-01-02
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 3/3A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 3/3The SAPUI5 frontend of the sample, and mostly an argument for writing UI5 in TypeScript: ES imports in place of sap.ui.define, a class with real private members in place of the underscore convention, and the service types generated from the CDS model copied into the UI package, so one IChats interface types the OData object the controller reads. The second half is structure — a formatter class and a singleton LayoutManager called from the XML view through core:require, a confirmation helper taking a callback, a dialog class resolving a promise, a generic createEntity<T> on a service class — all of it to keep every controller under 100 lines. What it says about arranging a UI5 app holds whatever model sits behind the chat; the tooling around it is of its date, and the post calls UI5's TypeScript support experimental.published 2023-02-27
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 3/3
cds2types. Affects Runnable code.
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 2/3A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 2/3The backend: CAP with TypeScript, the entities holding chats and personalities, and the service that talks to the API. This is where the streamed completion and the repositories behind the handler come from, which is the part of the sample still worth lifting even though the model access has since been superseded by AI Core.published 2023-02-24
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 2/3
cap-ui5-gpt-chat: no published releases, repository quiet for 41 months. Affects Runnable code.
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 1/3A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 1/3The concepts before the code: what the GPT model and its API actually offer, and what the finished chat application looks like — personalities included. Written in the weeks when the ground was moving under it, and the post carries its own change log to prove it: GPT-3.5 added on 1 March, GPT-4 on 15 March, and an admission that a series planned as two posts became three.published 2023-02-22
A ChatGPT-like chat app built with modern SAP technologies (CAP, SAPUI5) – Part 1/3
cap-ui5-gpt-chat: no published releases, repository quiet for 41 months. Affects Runnable code.
Run and Deploy CAP with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry (Node.js)Run and Deploy CAP with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry (Node.js)The deployment half of the pair, two weeks after the local one, and superseded the same way: it carries the same banner directing readers to @cap-js/postgres and the official documentation. The two together are the community PostgreSQL path as it stood before the core absorbed it.published 2020-11-30
Run and Deploy CAP with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry (Node.js)
cds-dbm. Affects Runnable code.
Getting started with CAP on PostgreSQL (Node.js)Getting started with CAP on PostgreSQL (Node.js)Running CAP on PostgreSQL locally in 2020, when doing so meant the community packages cds-pg and cds-dbm. It now opens with a banner the author added later: @sap/cds 7.0.0 has native PostgreSQL support, use @cap-js/postgres instead, with a pointer to a step-by-step guide for it. Worth having for that banner as much as for the content — a post that tells you not to follow it is a dated fact about where the answer moved.published 2020-11-16
Getting started with CAP on PostgreSQL (Node.js)
cds-pg. Affects Runnable code.
The Full Picture: Federating, Replicating, and Caching Remote Data in CAP — Part 1The Full Picture: Federating, Replicating, and Caching Remote Data in CAP — Part 1Part one of two, and the concepts half: terminology, what CAP already does, and what a project still has to write. It fixes a vocabulary — federation is the umbrella for making remote data part of your model, delegation forwards each request to the remote at query time, replication is a scheduled copy into the local database, and caching is an option on either rather than a third strategy — which collides with CAP's own, since what this series calls replication is what the CAP-level Data Federation guide calls federation. From the ground the Service Integration guide covers, it lists what is left to hand-write: cross-service $expand, navigation filters across the boundary, write forwarding, timeouts and retries, then scheduling, delta detection, backoff, a guard for two app instances sharing one schedule, idempotent writes, and knowing whether the last run succeeded. That list is why the edge to cds-data-federation holds: the second half maps it onto @federation.delegate and @federation.replicate and says which package carries which part — annotations in cds-data-federation, the scheduled engine in cds-data-pipeline, response caching through cds-caching — so it is the design rationale for the annotations, not the API reference. The gap list and the plugins answering it come from the same person who maintains them; cap-replication-demo and SAP's xtravels sample are cited as the hand-written form of the same work. Part 2 is announced as a walkthrough of a demo application and is not covered here.
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