As a key-user, you have a lot of capabilities to configure and customize your C4C solution with point and click declarative setup with business configuration, UI adaption, UI page layouts, translation/UI label workbench, custom object builder, business analytics, and workflow.
Occasionally, your functional requirements will be beyond the C4C standard functionality and will necessitate the use of SDK to achieve advanced UI, business logic, and data models to either extend the C4C standard functionality or build new capabilities. You may hear of the term PDI (partner development infrastructure), which was the original name of the SDK as it was first used for partners to build reusable add-ons for C4C. As we made SDK available for customers and partners to create customer specific C4C extensions, we changed the name from PDI to Cloud Applications Studio, or SDK for short.
The SDK uses the same C4C metadata driven "extensibility" configuration framework that manages your key user changes on a tenant. However, instead of the simple C4C web UI that is used to do define the key user configuration and customizations, you use the powerful Microsoft Visual Studio IDE (which a free version is provided with the C4C SDK installer).
This blog is a multi-part how-to series that shows you basic SDK administration activities that any key user could do. These SDK activities are a subset of what a SDK consultant/developer would do to not only administer, but also create and maintain SDK solutions.
The important SDK administration activities are the following:
- Part 1- How to manage C4C logins for SDK users and setup SDK on a computer
- Part 2- How to use the Repository Explorer to view the Public Solution Model (definition of the C4C data model and APIs)
- Part 3- How to manage the lifecycle of SDK solutions (create/delete, import/export, patch, activate/deactivate)
- Part 4- How to use the Debugger to do Root Cause Analysis of problematic SDK solutions
Thank you and have fun!
Rei Kasai
VP, Product Management
Cloud for Customer