topic Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account in Application Development and Automation Discussions

SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

qmacro — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 16:26:11 GMT

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

This task is the first in a group that belong together, and in it you will prepare the ground for the subsequent tasks in that group.

Background

The SAP Business Accelerator Hub contains API and related resources not only for SAP products such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur and so on, but also for the SAP Business Technology Platform, as you can see:

The Explore menu

Selecting this entry brings you to an overview page with links to APIs, events, integrations, business processes, workflow management resources and more. You'll see that one of the API packages available is Core Services for SAP BTP which contains multiple REST APIs, including:

Accounts Service
Entitlements Service
Events Service

and more.

These APIs afford you programmatic access to information on SAP BTP, specifically about your global accounts, subaccounts, directories, entitlements, services and lots more.

In the next few tasks you will take a small journey of discovery, one that will lead you to be able to make calls to these APIs, and in fact you will end up making a specific call to get a feel for how things operate and what you need to make such calls.

In order for everyone to have something consistent to work with, i.e. so that you all end up making essentially the same call, and will get the same results, this task will get you to create a directory in an SAP BTP account, with a custom label. In a subsequent task in this group you'll use the appropriate API in this Core Services for SAP BTP package to retrieve that information.

Your task

Your task here is to create a new directory within an SAP BTP global account accessible to you. If you don't have one, you can set up a trial account for free - see the "Hints and tips" section below for details.

Here are the task requirements:

The directory should be created at the top level of the account
It should be given the name developer-challenge
It should have one label named task with the value 7

You can do this any way you wish. You may want to use the SAP BTP Cockpit. You may wish to use the btp CLI. See the "Hints and tips" section below for both these approaches.

The value you need to get, to send to be hashed and shared in a reply to this discussion thread (as described, as always, in Task 0), is the length of the new directory's GUID. Not the GUID itself. The GUID consists of groups of hexadecimal digits interspersed with dashes. In calculating the length required, note that you should measure the length of the entire GUID, including the dashes.

Hints and tips

If you don't have a global account with which to work (for example, if you only have access to productive accounts at work and can't use them for learning), you can get a trial account on SAP BTP, and it won't cost you anything. You don't even need a credit card to sign up for one. Just follow the instructions in the tutorial Get a Free Account on SAP BTP Trial.

Creating the directory in the cockpit

You can create the directory from the Account Explorer section of the SAP BTP Cockpit.

Use the "Create -> Directory" menu from the button and specify the details appropriately, like this:

Once you've created the directory, it should look like this (you may have to adjust the display settings from the "tree view" to the "table view"). Note that the label information is available too in this display:

Creating the directory with the btp CLI

Of course, as #TheFutureIsTerminal, you may prefer to go for maximum efficiency and use the command line. Luckily for us there's a great command line tool for accessing and manipulating resources on SAP BTP, and that's the btp CLI, available from the SAP Development Tools website. There are plenty of resources on the btp CLI, here are just a few:

SAP Tech Bytes: btp CLI – installation (blog post)
Account Administration Using the SAP BTP Command Line Interface (btp CLI) (SAP Help Portal documentation)
The SAP btp CLI (video playlist from the Hands-on SAP Dev live stream show)

Here's a sample session where I use the btp CLI to create the directory, in that I:

log on
choose an account (my trial global account)
use the create action for the appropriate group and object (accounts/directory)

# developer-challenge-apis/tasks/7-create-assets-in-an-sap-btp-account (main %=)
; btp login
SAP BTP command line interface (client v2.38.0)

CLI server URL [https://cpcli.cf.eu10.hana.ondemand.com]>
Connecting to CLI server at https://cpcli.cf.eu10.hana.ondemand.com...

User> dj.adams@sap.com
Password>

Authentication successful

Choose a global account:
  [1] c2d7b67atrial
  [2] ...
  [3] ...
Choose option> 1

Current target:
 c2d7b67atrial (global account, subdomain: c2d7b67atrial-ga)

We stored your configuration file at: /home/user/.config/btp/config.json

Tips:
    Commands are executed in the target, unless specified otherwise using a parameter. To change the target, use 'btp target'.
    To provide feedback about the btp CLI, use 'btp feedback' to open our survey.

OK

# developer-challenge-apis/tasks/7-create-assets-in-an-sap-btp-account (main %=)
; btp create accounts/directory \
  --display-name "developer-challenge" \
  --labels '{"task":[7]}'
Creating directory in global account 7da58aab-6c60-4492-a95b-b1ed3139e242...

directory id:         57675710-7b16-43ec-b64a-ab14660c1b24
display name:         developer-challenge
description:
directory features:   DEFAULT
created by:           dj.adams@sap.com
custom properties:    name:   value:
                      task    7
labels:               name:   value:
                      task    [7]
parent id:            7da58aab-6c60-4492-a95b-b1ed3139e242
parent type:          global account
state:                OK
state message:        Directory created.

Command runs in the background.
Use 'btp get accounts/directory' to verify status.

OK

Although the value 7 for the task label is scalar, it must be specified in the JSON value for the --labels parameter inside an array, i.e. [7] rather than just 7.

For discussion

Did you use the cockpit or the CLI tool? Which would or do you prefer? If you used the btp CLI, how did the installation go? Did you install it "natively" or did you use the script described in the SAP Tech Bytes: btp CLI – installation blog post?

What are some of your other power command line tools, inside the SAP ecosphere and also beyond?

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ajmaradiaga — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:23:13 GMT

6894b670c2b1d9effe360d9263c5a551027217db47e074a3e3eafaf3ad159931

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

abdullahgunes — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:35:50 GMT

2664a2065b2ff35ba59faf6050325ca6ae1c611258d263c50818526c95d6d574

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ADR — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:41:46 GMT

9b7f173b65e798b175507f24164c8f9ee1c8f7ac966a8fd0a1b02cb98199cad1

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

kasch-code — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:48:54 GMT

c07375534f481320e171d193db89ceb7e962fbcdc7ecd70239c2c22b6f820c92

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ADR — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:49:34 GMT

Hi DJ, @qmacro , I used CLI to create it. I got my inspiration to use CLI from your Youtube videos and blogs. 🙂

I have created multiple scripts to automate role collection creations, user management in BTP.

- Anupam

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

FooThePolarBear — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 06:50:52 GMT

11169b1f0973473cf910d4859662e2f71c60a471ddca9943468fee5510adf601

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

harsh_itaverma — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:24:03 GMT

f00bef0e3c26513480bb3289f1de77df63f0431f5cc9da838d860e7187ab5326

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ceedee666 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:51:42 GMT

e3a9d78fdd1e0ecf80c4f6c338860d93c021f236a6693a32916e1928b8fc2c1b

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

AAncos — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:52:41 GMT

c58bcd48fe2e72b06626e681fbae2df7b4aa338d0c96a0210cc16e5e21c09e48

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

vladimirs_semikins — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:08:33 GMT

04948d4d766ac04f63d20120d6ce07525f3bc5b0575fa8a141880a37f8726d58

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ceedee666 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:56:41 GMT

I used the CLI to create the directory.

I then tried to read the directory again using the API. However, I was not able to find a service to list all directories in an subaccount. The same is true for the CLI. I allways need the GUID of the directory in order to get the details. Or am I missing someting?

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

vladimirs_semikins — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:58:04 GMT

To learn new stuff I've used the BTP CLI, as normally I'm doing the same via BTP Cockpit UI

Also, I had trouble logging into BTP because I was using an outdated version of btp cli. It took me a while to realize this, so I want to remind anyone experiencing the same issue to update their BTP CLI to the latest version.

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

ceedee666 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:12:50 GMT

OK. Found it. The possibility to get directories is well hidden 😉. It is possible to list the directories of a global account using:

btp get accounts/global-account --show-hierarchy

The same is true for the API. The /accounts/v1/globalAccount operation has a parameter expand.

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

harsh_itaverma — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:15:59 GMT

I tried using the BTP cockpit and the cli too. Went ahead with the installation of the BTP CLI using the script file and it was pretty quick to install. This was a good learning (would definitely follow the complete blog series).

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

UweFetzer_se38 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:26:15 GMT

81d27aac83f8da433cddb9be0b3a0f94a68debcb4fce611f9a79bf211d5a6460

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

Tomas_Buryanek — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:26:39 GMT

dd7caaf2525d4234f09df1e188f4f0d4bcc376ce065cfaeec9ed4b39fd6e254c

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

qmacro — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:45:23 GMT

Excellent, great to hear! 🚀

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

qmacro — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:45:44 GMT

Nice one @harsh_itaverma !

Re: SAP Developer Challenge - APIs - Task 7 - Create a new directory in an SAP BTP account

qmacro — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:47:45 GMT

Nice find 🙂 In fact, that command, with the --show-hierarchy parameter, is one I use the most often, so often in fact that I have an alias `btphier` 🙂

https://github.com/qmacro/dotfiles/blob/main/bashrc.d/84-sap-btp.sh#L57