Consuming APIs from Business Objects Cloud via SAP API Management

[Murali_Shanmu]

API Management on HANA Cloud Platform helps drive innovation in modern business models. It provides a unified access from new channels and diverse user interfaces by enabling developer communities to securely connect to your enterprise information and processes. Above all, it simplifies access to back-end services and complex landscapes and allows easy consumption of digital assets and at the same time protecting the systems from threats and overloaded access.

In this blog post Consuming APIs from Web IDE via SAP API Management, sapmsfttest walks through the process of exposing the APIs via API Management and consuming it in SAP Web IDE. In this blog, I am going to take a similar approach, but going to demonstrate how you could create a rich visualization in HANA Cloud Platform based on APIs which are exposed from API Management. Last month Business Object Cloud (BOC) announced the support of OData by providing adapters which can read from any OData source. As you all might be aware by now, SAP is making OData as the default way of exposing business information from their on-premise and cloud solutions. API Management plays a crucial role in ensuring these OData APIs are securely exposed to outside world or even to another department within the same organization.

Perquisites

• Access a trial landscape, you need to have a developer account first. If you still need to create a developer account, you can start from here: Signing Up for a Developer Account.
• Setup your API Management service by registering an ES4 System. I have documented this earlier in this blog.
• Access to Cloud for Analytics account, to register you can start from here: Discover Cloud For Analytics.

Assuming you have created an API based on ES4 ABAP system, open the API to view the policies. To keep things simple, I have just added policies to hard code my ES4 logon credentials.

Navigate to the Resources Tab and click on the SalesOrderCollection link.

This will open a new browser window and display the results.

Launch your Business Objects Cloud tenant and create a model which refers to the Sales Order Collection.

Select “Get data from an app” and choose “OData Services”.

Create a new connection pointing to the OData API exposed from API Management.

Create a new Query by referring to the Sales Order entity set which is available in the OData API.

In the Query builder, drag and drop the fields which are required for reporting purposes.

Give a name for your model and save the model. With this you are now ready to build stories in BOC which can display rich charts consuming the exposed APIs.

Navigate to the Stories menu to create a Story with charts.

Click on “Add Canvas”

Assign the previously created model to this story by clicking on “Add data”.

Select the model created earlier – “SalesOrderModel”

This will take you to the story designer where you can add your charts and map the X and Y coordinates with the measures and dimensions.

Below is my final output which displays Sales Order details available in ES4 backend system through the APIs which are exposed via API Management on HANA Cloud Platform.