Activating Contact-To-Account relationships breaks all earlier integrations?

[JoycaVervinckt]

Hi all,

I hope that there might be a problem for this issue:

I am activating contact-to-account relationships on my test system for a POC.

In our company, we have both B2B as B2C entities (seperated by marketing areas). The contact-to-account relationships are relevant for B2B.

I did read on the SAP Help pages on the step "Public OData API Integration" that version 4 of API_MKT_CONTACT should be used, but I thought that meant only if I would connect external systems that would also need to import relationships. As of course the older versions would show errors when trying to import relationships on those.

But what I noticed now, is that ALL of our other existing interfaces (that run on older versions of the contact api) turn to errors!

I have a couple of other integrations set up, mainly for the B2C processes, like with websites that make use of the "external landing page data integration" standard CPI package: , as well as some systems directly using API_MKT_CONTACT.

They all say "Contact Projections can only be used with version 4 of the Contacts API."

But as mentioned, one of the integrations is a standard CPI package, but apparently that one isn't on version 4 yet?

But also all our other existing interfaces are not on version 4, and it's a huge effort to change them all.

On the other hand, it also doesn't seem possible to revert the activation of contact-to-account relationships!

So is there anything I can still do now to make my interfaces work again? 😞

Desperate regards,

Joyca Vervinckt

[SCHNEIDERT]

Hey Joyca, good to know that. Cause I'm also thinking about activating that relationship... very curious about the solution and hope SAP could give you some hints on that topic *fingerscrossed*...

[JoycaVervinckt]

Intermediate update:

my current conclusion is that we must update all our interfaces to version 4.

The "external landing page" standard integration that I mentioned above, there currently SAP is saying that this one only supports version 2, and support for version 4 would be a feature request -_- but I don't agree with that.

[JoycaVervinckt]

Unfortunately, there is no solution possible for this.

When activating Contact to Account relationships, all Contact API calls below version 4 will fail.

The "External Landing Page" standard CPI integration package runs on version 2 so is incompatible with this.

SAP provided the following workaround description for that package:

• the contact api version 2 offers a specific set of features which are working fine. However, the version 2 doesn't support Contact-to-Account relationships. Since the contact api version 2 is working in general this is not an error, but rather a missing functionality of the api version that our Integration Flow is currently using. Since enabling our IFlow for version 4 is not just a small change, but rather adjusting the complete logic of our Integration Flow, this comes with some major development effort. That is why I would propose to create a feature request in our Influencer Tool.
• In the meantime, I would recommend you to make use of our extensibility functionality that allows you to call a custom Integration Flow during the process time of our Integration Flow. In this custom Integration Flow it would be possible for you to call the SMC backend with contact api version 4 and afterwards redirect back to our Integration Flow. Please find more information about the extensibility functionality in our Application Help. This functionality is already in use by several customers. One of them wrote an own Blog Post to describe the general procedure.

So as suggested, I created this Influence Request: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/259238

Please upvote if you are also impacted by this!

Kr

Joyca

[SCHNEIDERT]

Hi Joyca, thanks for the update! Got my vote, hope it will be developed soon.

BR Tobias