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Step 3: Controls (TypeScript)

Now it is time to build our first little UI by replacing the “Hello World” text in the HTML body by the OpenUI5 control sap/m/Text. In the beginning, we will use the TypeScript control API to set up the UI, the control instance is then placed into the HTML body.

Preview

The “Hello World” text is now displayed by a OpenUI5 control

Hello World

Coding

You can view all files at OpenUI5 TypeScript Walkthrough - Step 3: Controls and download the solution as a zip file.

webapp/package.json

First, we need to install @types/openui5 to get the type definitions for OpenUI5. Open a terminal in the app root folder and execute the following command:

npm install @types/openui5 --save-dev

This will install the type definitions for OpenUI5 and update the package.json file with this new development dependency.

webapp/index.ts

We then make some changes to our index.ts file: We remove the alert method and instantiate an OpenUI5 Text control instead; its options are passed to the constructor with a TypeScript object. For our control we set the text property to the value “Hello World”.

We chain the constructor call of the control to the standard placeAt method that is used to place OpenUI5 controls inside a node of the document object model (DOM) or any other OpenUI5 control instance. We pass the content ID as an argument.

import Text from "sap/m/Text";

new Text({
    text: "Hello World"
}).placeAt("content");

Controls are used to define appearance and behavior of parts of the screen.

All controls of OpenUI5 have a fixed set of properties, aggregations, and associations for configuration. You can find their descriptions in the Demo Kit. In addition, each control comes with a set of public functions that you can look up in the API reference.

Note:

Only instances of sap.ui.core.Control or their subclasses can be rendered stand-alone and have a placeAt function. Each control extends sap.ui.core.Element that can only be rendered inside controls. Check the API reference to learn more about the inheritance hierarchy of controls. The API documentation of each control refers to the directly known subclasses.

webapp/index.html

We replace the <div> tags in our webapp/index.html file with a <body> tag and assign it the ID content. The body tag of the HTML document thus becomes the target node for the text control we defined in the index.ts script.

We also add the sapUiBody class, which provides additional theme-dependent styles.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8">
	<title>UI5 TypeScript Walkthrough</title>
	<script
		id="sap-ui-bootstrap"
		src="resources/sap-ui-core.js"
		data-sap-ui-theme="sap_horizon"
		data-sap-ui-compat-version="edge"
		data-sap-ui-async="true"
		data-sap-ui-on-init="module:ui5/walkthrough/index"
		data-sap-ui-resource-roots='{
			"ui5.walkthrough": "./"
		}'>
	</script>
</head>
<body class="sapUiBody" id="content">
</body>
</html>