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co-authored by: @EvgeniyGorbunov
Hello everyone!
With Enterprise Automation with SAP, we bring together technologies such as SAP Signavio, SAP Integration Suite and SAP Build in order to provide a unified framework to address process analysis, automation and integration needs of an intelligent enterprise.
These technologies have multiple integration touchpoints and can be used together for the best benefit in a vast amount of use-cases.
You can find more detailed information about the Enterprise Automation with SAP here.
Practical need
In this blog post, I would like to focus on one specific usage pattern of the Enterprise Automation framework: how to ensure the developer efficiency while simplifying connectivity to underlying data sources. It is always better to explain such pattern with a practical scenario, so let us look into the manufacturing area as an example.
An organization wants a clear view of all maintenance orders and material reservations for the equipment maintenance. The bigger the company is, more the equipment it possesses – and it is vital to ensure the right maintenance timelines and see all the issues in a transparent way.
For this, the company needs to gather data from multiple sources and display it in a user interface. Later, the responsible person can review the information in a dashboard-like format and proceed with sending the relevant maintenance and repair orders.
How can they achieve their goal in a short time and with limited resources thanks to the Enterprise Automation capabilities?
How does it work?
Graph is a powerful enhancement to API Management, capability of SAP Integration Suite, which supports in transforming APIs. You can easily and securely provide your integration and application developers with selective, abstracted access to your enterprise data via a single, easy-to-use API. The enterprise data is semantically connected in the form of a business data graph.
To build the end user interface SAP Build Apps is being used. SAP Build Apps is a professional application development solution providing an intuitive no-code development environment to empower business users and developers to create apps quickly and visually.
Setup
You can setup business data graph in your subaccount, where identity, trust and connectivity can be established between your applications, extensions and integrations, and your landscape. An advantage of Graph is that IT Administrators take care of the Business Data Graph as well as the destination’s configuration, while developers just consume the entities via Graph independent of which specific tenants they are working with.
In our use case architecture, SAP Build Apps application consumes both SAP S/4 HANA Cloud entities Reservation and maintenance Order via Graph. User Identity is propagated from SAP Build Apps to Graph, and Graph will propagate the identity to each specific backend tenant to verify the end user authentication and authorization.
Developers only connect to the Graph destination configured by IT Administrators without having to care about changes on the specific backend servers’ configuration.
Creation of Graph custom entity
You can start by defining a custom entity using Graph Model extension editor in SAP Integration Suite. Reservation and maintenance order entities can be composed using the step-by-step business data graph extension wizard. The activated business data graph API will be binded to SAP build apps for further consumption.
Please refer the blog post to understand how a model extension is created.
Creating an app with SAP Build Apps
Create a web and mobile application in SAP Build apps as per the custom scenario by consuming the data from Graph unified API.
Once the Graph API is consumed, it makes it possible to execute queries by consuming data from multiple entities composed in Graph in a same UI Component.
Now that we are done with configurations and designing the UI for the scenario, our scenario would look like the one recorded in the video here.
Summary:
We saw how you can connect your applications using a unified API that abstracts underlying data sources using the Graph functionality of SAP Integration Suite. This way, you can consolidate the data, expose and easily reuse it in your application at the runtime.
But that is not all. We looked at an example with an application above. On top of that, we also face the need to have an abstraction layer to connect data to the process flow, created in SAP Build Process Automation. We can ensure API connectivity from the process using actions to encapsulate API calls, and by using Graph we can simplify this connectivity by having one unified layer underneath. If we put it in frame of a scenario above, if we need an additional approval step to coordinate, we can leverage SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation and Graph in one unified scenario.
Find more detailed information about the Enterprise Automation with SAP and how to get started in the blog post.
Find more information about Graph in SAP Integration Suite in this blog post series.
And use the community page of SAP Integration Suite for more information and exchange on the SAP Graph topic.
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