Business Technology Platform solution diagrams and icons taken to the next level

A few years back, the introduction of the SAP Icons & Samples for solution diagrams eased our lives as BTP architects. It was and still is great to have all icons available and a set of templates as a basis to start from (although PowerPoint is not the best solution in my personal opinion). 

Announcement blog: Be Visual! Use Official Icons and Samples for SAP Business Technology Platform Solution Diagrams | S… 

In the meanwhile, the original Wiki page has already been removed and it’s now only possible to download the templates and icons through direct links provided in the comments. Unfortunately, the last update of the SAP BTP Icons dates from somewhere around March 2021. 

A few weeks ago, I saw some new blogs reusing the same outdated icons for draw.io, which is an absolutely great alternative compared to the PowerPoint templates. 

• Creating SAP BTP solution diagrams with Draw.io (Diagrams.net) | SAP Blogs (by Mauricio Lauffer) 
• Creating architecture diagrams with code | SAP Blogs (by Antonio Maradiaga) 

Edit: The original solution Mauricio mentioned in his blog does contain updated icons, which I missed while I wrote this blog and created this solution. (See Mauricio’s comment below.) 

So that got me thinking: how can I make sure I have the latest BTP icons available for my solution and architecture diagrams? I came up with a few requirements I wanted to have available in my solution diagrams: 

Latest version of BTP service icon as-is 

Latest version of BTP service icon surrounded by a circle (as typically seen in the previous libraries) 

Generic SAP Icons (as included in SAP Fiori) 

 Introducing the BTP Diagram Icon generator 

The BTP Diagram Icon Generator is a yeoman generator that: 

• Downloads the latest BTP service icons from the SAP Discovery Center 
• Generates a version of the service icon surrounded by a circle 
• Uses the UI5 Web Components to extract the Fiori icons 
• Icons are generated in two formats: file-based in a folder structure so they can be used in any diagram designing tool and as a draw.io/diagrams.net library which can easily be imported. 
• Icons can be organised by category as defined in the SAP Discovery Center or by type. 

 Using the BTP Diagram Icon Generator 

Generating your own BTP diagram icons is a matter of installing Nodejs, yeoman generator and the BTP Diagram Icon Generator itself. 

1. 1.First download and install Nodejs for your OS. 
2. 2. After installing Nodejs, open a terminal/command-line and execute following command: 
3. 3. npm install -g yo generator-btp-diagram-icons 

Now you’re ready to run the generator! In the terminal/command-line, navigate to the folder where you want the icons to be generated and execute following command: 

yo btp-diagram-icons 

After the generator is finished, your folder will contain a set of folders containing the icons and libraries based on the choices made in the generator.

btp: BTP service icon files (regular & circled)

icons: SAP Fiori icon files

libraries: draw.io/diagrams.net libraries

Wrap-up

You now have the latest icons available for all your BTP solution diagrams! Whenever a new service is released, it’s just a matter of running the generator again and the new service icon will be created automatically.

Hope you enjoyed this new open-source solution and happy diagramming!