🟢 Extending your On-Premise OData Entities in CAP

Hey Federico, 

Good question. For proof-of-concept purposes I connected it straight to the on-premise gateway. Assuming this is the way you're working now and you can reach your launchpad on gateway, you should be able to use that directly in your CAP application. Save the metadata file, import it with 

cds import metadata.xml --as cds

and fix the credentials in your package.json

You will be able to use the service on your gateway system directly, so you get real data. If it's only exposed via cloud connector and a destination in BTP but you can't actually access BTP, then that is a problem. You'll always need some sort of access in order to get to the destination. 

You could also mock it by setting up a second cap application like Katan did, but use the definitions generated by the `as --cds` import, you'll find them in `srv/external`, and set up a second CAP service that uses CSV data. All SAP examples already use mock data so that should not be tremendously difficult to replicate. 

I cannot in good conscious recommend this for productive use either, not because it's not possible but because of potential license implication in the usage of CAP.  

"ZYOUR_SERVICE": { "kind": "odata-v2", "model": "srv/external/ZYOUR_SERVICE", "credentials": { "url": "https://portal.url.or.ip/sap/opu/odata/sap/ZYOUR_SERVICE", "authentication": "BasicAuthentication", "username": "youruser", "password": "yourpassword" } },

Hello Jorg,
thanks for the clarifications. My concern was all about the development scope, because I wanted to find a comfortable way to quickly develop and test with real data without necessarily having to deploy the app just to have access to an external service. I guess I'll just stick to the direct gateway connection - when available - and to mocking the data locally.
If I don't have a public gateway or the external service lies behind a Cloud Connector instance, BTP is an obligated choice then?

Thanks

For development scope, hooking it up to gateway is quick and painless. It doesn't need to be public as long as you are inside the same (private) network. If you do not have a gateway the only other exposure I can think of is the OData provisioning on BTP, so yeah then you're stuck with that.