Export data using ABAP CDS views - is it possible?

[ashwinipingle]

Hello ABAP developers,

We have a need to pull out some data (very few records - in 100s) from SAP to an external system.

Can we create ABAP CDS views which can then be accessible from an external system? The external application can pull the data on-demand. Is there a better/standard approach to exporting data from SAP to external system?

We thought of the following

1. Extract data by writing an ABAP program and pushing all of this data onto a specific directory on server where SAP is installed periodically e.g. every night --- this is not preferred due to data not being latest.

2. RFC

However we are also wondering if ABAP CDS views can be written such that external application can access the views and these views will contain latest data. Please point me to some links if there are already articles on this. We do not have any BI/BW system landscape so we currently do not have any ETL/etc.

Best Regards,

Ashwini Pingle

[ashwinipingle]

Hello ABAP developers,

We have a need to pull out some data (very few records - in 100s) from SAP to an external system.

Can we create ABAP CDS views which can then be accessible from an external system? The external application can pull the data on-demand. Is there a better/standard approach to exporting data from SAP to external system?

We thought of the following

1. Extract data by writing an ABAP program and pushing all of this data onto a specific directory on server where SAP is installed periodically e.g. every night --- this is not preferred due to data not being latest.

2. RFC

However we are also wondering if ABAP CDS views can be written such that external application can access the views and these views will contain latest data. Please point me to some links if there are already articles on this. We do not have any BI/BW system landscape so we currently do not have any ETL/etc.

Best Regards,

Ashwini Pingle

[FredericGirod]

CDS Views have been build to be exposed.

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/04/06/expose-cds-views-as-odata-service/

you will find a lot of doc about this

[ashwinipingle]

Thanks a lot Frederic. I got to know from your response that the views can be exposed. I will try to work on this area to see if this helps us. I am also assuming that "CDS" views you are referring to are ABAP CDS views and not the HANA CDS views (because there are HANA views also that are native to HANA and I think they cannot be exposed -- but maybe I am confused).

Best Regards,

Ashwini Pingle

[FredericGirod]

Yes I think you are true. Because HANA CDS hasn't the corresponding view declared in the ABAP dictionary.

There is a good book "Core Data Services for ABAp" on sap-press (I haven't finished to read it)

[Mattias]

What requirements are you trying to meet that is not fulfilled by CDS / Odata? For large volumes I would go for another technique, otherwise I would use CDS/Odata.

[ashwinipingle]

Hello Mattias,

I have to make available PPM (Portfolio and Project Management) data available to external application.

Some of the data is not directly availabe in tables and is available using Webdynpro/ABAP methods/function modules,etc. I am not so much of an ABAPer however I can do good PL/SQL hence was curious to know if we can expose SAP data. Since the data is not much, I would like to go for exposing views.

Best Regards,

Ashwini Pingle

[former_member194549]

Hi Pingle,

what do you mean with "some of the data is not directly available in tables..."?

With CDS views, you can primarily only access data from tables and views. If you want to use function modules, classes or other logic, you could use SAP Gateway to also create OData services and expose data. Here, however, the implementation takes place in ABAP.

Regards
Simon

[Frank-Martin]

As an alternative to an ODATA service you could also expose a CDS view entity in a SQL service and access it via the ODBC driver for ABAP.

Using the ODBC driver for ABAP on Linux | SAP Blogs

Regards

Frank