Requesting/storing a specific UI5 version for application

Question

I have an application that uses SAPUI5. I have extensively styled the result using my own CSS, which greatly enhances the appearance and usability of the application.

A few weeks ago a new release of the SAPUI5 libs was released to the

https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/resources/sap-ui-core.js

address (and the AU and US servers too). This new release changed some of the rendering of buttons. This broke some of my CSS. (it also fixed a bunch of other issues, but unfortunately the broken CSS was far more obvious.)

Is there a way to request a certain version of UI5 when requesting from the SAP maintained libraries? Or is the only solution to copy the library and host it myself (and refer to the hosted version in my application?)

It seems unfortunate if the second option is my only real choice, as this would mean I'm not going to benefit from other applications having loaded UI5 libs into cache. Given how long it can take to load UI5 libs, this is a great shame.

I also note that jQuery themselves make it very clear that you should never refer to the latest version of their lib in your productive code:

http://blog.jquery.com/2014/07/03/dont-use-jquery-latest-js/

"So let’s be clear: Don’t use jquery-latest.js on a production site."

I think the same should/could be true about UI5 - please tell me it is? Or if it isn't that this is planned?

Thanks!

N.B. I'm referring here to the libs maintained on the HCP servers - https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com, https://sapui5.ap1.hana.ondemand.com and https://sapui5.us1.hana.ondemand.com not any locally maintained SAP servers.

Answer 1

And it has finally come to pass:

https://help.hana.ondemand.com/help/frameset.htm?2d3eb2f322ea4a82983c1c62a33ec4ae.html

You can use SAPUI5 in any HTML page from SAP HANA Cloud Platform with the following bootstrap script:

<script id="sap-ui-bootstrap" type="text/javascript" src="https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/resources/sap-ui-core.js" data-sap-ui-theme="sap_bluecrystal" data-sap-ui-libs="sap.m"></script>

If you want to make sure that you refer to a stable version of SAPUI5, you can use a versioned URL as in the example below:

<script id="sap-ui-bootstrap" type="text/javascript" src="https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/1.28.8/resources/sap-ui-core.js" data-sap-ui-theme="sap_bluecrystal" data-sap-ui-libs="sap.m"></script>

The first segment of the URL after the host name is used to specify a concrete SAPUI5 version.

This is great news and will finally mean I can stop storing all my UI5 libs as part of my projects and hopefully users may have them cached. Now just to hope that these versioned libs are on a CDN :)