topic Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint in Application Development and Automation Discussions

SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

qmacro — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 06:26:57 GMT

(Check out the SAP Developer Challenge - APIs blog post for everything you need to know about the challenge to which this task relates!)

Now you're familiar with the Date and Time API, you are in a position to try out one of the endpoints.

Background

For many APIs on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub there are options to "try out" the endpoints. You can define your own environment that you can then use to connect to from the hub:

There's also a sandbox environment that's available for some of the API packages too, and this Date and Time API is one that is available in this sandbox environment.

Your task

Your task is to make a call to a specific endpoint in this API.

That endpoint is one of those that you might have seen in the previous task, but not one that met the criteria of that task. It's this one:

/getCountryDateFormat

The reason it doesn't meet the criteria is because a response to a request to this endpoint is returned in a text representation, i.e. MIME type text/plain, and not JSON.

You must specify the value DE for the country parameter.

But rather than just use the Try Out facility on the hub, you should instead make the call using an HTTP client of your choice. There's some examples given in the Hints and tips section of Task 0.

In order to "persuade" you to make the HTTP call yourself, you need not only the response to such a call, but you'll need also a specific header from the HTTP response. That header is a custom header, i.e. is prefixed with x- and relates to a traditional programming language in the SAP world.

So you need to take two values:

the content of the response payload (remember, it is in a text/plain representation)
the x- prefixed SAP language related header name, as it appears in the HTTP response

The header name should already appear in lower case, but please make sure it is, i.e. before you use it (see the next paragraph), ensure that it is all-lowercase.

You must join these two values together into a single string, concatenated with a comma.

It's this single string that you must send to be hashed and shared in a reply to this discussion thread as described in Task 0.

So for example, if the response payload was:

"banana"

and the response headers looked like this:

Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2023 12:05:40 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 12
Connection: keep-alive
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-abap-hidden-header: 123.456ms
x-request-id: 54dcdcb3-cf10-4d2b-6a2d-64ad846bd1e5
x-response-time: 417.10979ms
x-vcap-request-id: 54dcdcb3-cf10-4d2b-6a2d-64ad846bd1e5
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload;
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: false

then the string to hash would be:

"banana",x-abap-hidden-header

Hints and tips

You'll need to find out how to authenticate the HTTP request, and provide the appropriate authentication details. If you don't, your request will be refused, with an HTTP 401 status code. Here's an example, where you see the headers of the request (identified with > characters at the start of the line) and of the response (identified with < characters at the start of the line):

> GET /dateandtime/getTimezoneFromLocation?country=DE HTTP/1.1
> Host: sandbox.api.sap.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.74.0
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
< Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2023 11:59:48 GMT
< Content-Type: application/json
< Content-Length: 146
< Connection: keep-alive
<

You'll also receive some JSON in the response body telling you what's missing.

In order to get the authentication details you need, you'll need to be logged on to the hub.

You'll need to get your HTTP client or client library to emit the details of the HTTP response, so you can see the headers and find the one required. For example with curl, you could use the --include option, or even the --verbose option.

For discussion

Have you seen x- prefixed headers before? What does this prefix signify? Is this still common practice these days?

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

harsh_itaverma — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 07:10:56 GMT

8898365d70a3e31036797f78e85a8eceda5260ea364eb7a330d8773659f2edaf

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

vladimirs_semikins — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:26:10 GMT

a0e16215ca28402d1eaf56a13e910bebd2b5682a9c872e5644bc00c95463fd84

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

Frank_Haschick — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 07:24:02 GMT

a52cde5e66513754cf02d111c5c2f5d15be911419ee2debc8c4b6b0802e4c2ac

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

abdullahgunes — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 07:57:40 GMT

2af2f9128fc1834076ba842e8e9d855aa1b6f0819e8b03ae099dbcd68a43a12c

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

kasch-code — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 08:23:35 GMT

72e3182f0cb7b921df9012f370a88a2ab2b6444ae43b879e6b120cc20e2824c0

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

Tomas_Buryanek — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:26:30 GMT

63d3f3e7ab25200c3e63c644bebb0130c9ae8de6a5396e038d43eea2207d8250

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

RaulVega — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:27:17 GMT

360de92ace3f6adb20237b7f60be042d131b65e4556a140c078eb904d1b3643c

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

prachetas — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:56:36 GMT

0fde67cdda4944a297a25fcd288fbb36baf06010b762c340272af55b9fcc32fb

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

berserk — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:21:29 GMT

a2bbf5a6ed4de3bc82a1cd3bb88c925c2c4bc770ed49ae181bda82b8e0e8bee2

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

jasshauer — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:28:58 GMT

26b5e27d9dac255a55d0d94a2819452bd079d57e3cb629480939071fe5384a26

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

ADR — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:14:54 GMT

a0e16215ca28402d1eaf56a13e910bebd2b5682a9c872e5644bc00c95463fd84

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

SandipAgarwalla — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:17:51 GMT

So looks like I am missing something here. I executed the API using Postman, only had to set the APIkey. Setting any header with "x-" in response was not needed. What am I missing here? Thanks

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

ADR — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:23:32 GMT

@qmacro The response text is in uppercase, do we need to use it as lowercase as well?

Checked with few community ids; my hash value is not matching with most of the responses except @vladimirs_semikins . Not sure who are missing something here. 🙂

-Anupam

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

qmacro — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:03:51 GMT

Greetings lovely participants!

Just a quick note to suggest you check you've followed the instructions carefully, I see from the logs that some of you may seem to be calling a different API endpoint. Remember that the response from the call should be a date format. Not a timezone 🙂

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

kasch-code — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:04:08 GMT

Are you sure you called the correct endpoint? According to the task it should be

/getCountryDateFormat

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

qmacro — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:06:05 GMT

Thanks for checking! But note that the payload of the response is not all in upper case. And anyway, the instructions only ask that you set the response header to lower case, not the payload value.

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

qmacro — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:07:39 GMT

Thanks @kasch-code ... good tip 😉

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

qmacro — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:09:31 GMT

You might want to check the instructions. There is nowhere in there that requires you to set and send an 'x-' prefixed header ... 🙂

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 5 - Call the country date format API endpoint

vladimirs_semikins — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 12:16:17 GMT

Oh, wait then my answer is wrong 🤓

Thanks for this hint