Many complex nonlinear systems have intrinsic structures such as energy dissipation or conservation, and/or positivity/maximum principle preserving. It is desirable, sometimes necessary, to preserve these structures in a numerical scheme. I will present some recent advances on using the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach to develop highly efficient and accurate structure preserving schemes for a large class of complex nonlinear systems. These schemes can preserve energy dissipation/conservation as well as other global constraints and/or are positivity/bound preserving, only require solving decoupled linear equations with constant coefficients at each time step, and can achieve higher-order accuracy.