Get your hands dirty: SuccessFactors API access for HCP-based extensions
As announced on the recent SuccessConnect event in Las Vegas – it’s possible to build SuccessFactors BizX extension scenarios, based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform. As of SuccessFactors 1311 release, among many other features, this is now officially rolled out to customers and partners.
I’m sure many of you already have ideas about what scenario would best fit to your company or you clients – aspects like company car management, benefits and health safety, time tracking, etc. easily come to mind. And that’s really great. We get quite some ideas from colleagues and we’re in progress of developing a number of extensions internally.
Getting access
What is essential to all of those scenarios are the set of prerequisites which stand on the way, before you can see your first extension running:
- SuccessFactors and SAP HANA Cloud Platform – those are relatively easy to get as part of our SAP Cloud Applications Partner center program. Both need in addition some initial configuraton content.
- Subscription to SAP HANA Cloud Portal – in order to get smooth and slick extension UI – we recommend Cloud Portal layer, which besides branding/retheming, also covers 1st and 2nd level native SuccessFactors navigation.
- SucessFactors Provisioning access in order to configure your SFSF instance – in case you seriously plan to engage in customer projects going forward – this indeed requires that you go through a SuccessFactors partner training.
- API documentation, outlining the functionality you can access using the SuccessFactors APIs.
Among many other materials – all of those are of course available to SuccessFactors and HCP partners.
API demo access
While actively supporting partners to develop and productize their extension applications – we’d also like to invite more developers to engage on the topic of SuccessFactors extensions. Developing those should be really easy based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform free developer accounts and we’ll further lower the bar to enable develoeprs to experiment with the system. Building experience and prototype future applications based on SAP HCP Trial should be the default choice for developers interested in extending SuccessFactors. For that purpose we’re happy to announce public demo API access to a SuccessFactors Trial system.
Starting today you can:
- Clone the Benefits application we’ve released a month ago among the other HCP samples on GitHub
- Run it end-to-end on a local server, using the SAP HCP Development Server for local development
- Run it end-to-end on SAP HCP Trial landscape
- In both cases you’ll be using the provided SuccessFactors trial system for API access.
- Read more details on the SuccessFactors OData API, released in 1305 release and consistently improved every quater so far.
- In order to have a configurable, automatically rethemable extension – you’ll use the Trial Cloud Portal service and create a portal site around your application, thus integrating with 1-st and 2-nd level SuccessFactors navigation.
We’ve made that end-to-end integrated scenario available as part of our 6-week long Intro to SAP HCP openSAP course.
More details on how to get the application up and running are available in the Benefits sample project readme.
API demo limitations
Please keep in mind the following SuccessFactors demo API access limitations:
- Our SuccessFactors API demo system offers only OData API access. It’s not possible to login interactively to the SuccessFactors system. It’s not possible to use SF API or Jam API (yet).
- You can’t change the underlying SuccessFactors system data – for the sake of our openSAP course and getting reproducible experience – it’s restricted to read-only operations for now.
- You’ll use your HCP-trial user to connect to the SuccessFactors system. Under the hood we’ll transparently map that to a pre-defined SuccessFactors user in order to ensure that all of you have consistent experience going though the Benefits sample. In other words – all the “my profile”, “my team”, etc queries will always return the details of one of the same user, regardless who has logged in to the system.
- In case you decide to explore further and make queries of the profiles of other users by name – this will work fine. There are more than 300 demo-data users in the system, whom you can experiment with.
- You can’t create new MDF object definitions (yet). This will come with subsequent releases of our SuccessFactors API demo system.
Have fun coding and keep us posted on your findings.
This is awesome that it has been possible to get access to a SuccessFactors system (even if only an API) for people to see how the solution works. 😎
Hopefully this is the first step in the long road to providing low cost access to development frameworks for SAP Cloud extensions.
Nice work, I will be interested to learn how many people take advantage of using this read-only SuccessFactors EC(?) system to check out the API. It would be nice if perhaps additional read access to SF API could be enabled too.
I'll be very interested in how you allow MDF object creation in the system in the future that doesn't muck up the access for all users, a temporary GUID used to access the temporarily create object that has been created via an API (assuming still not access to actually log into the SuccessFactors instance)??? Very interesting! 🙂
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks Krasimir for this.
After several software updates, I managed to deploy it on my HCP Trial account.
I could not deploy it locally, probably missed some steps:
- neousers.json content would not load automatically (although already in right location)
- so I created these users manually
when I deploy locally, I have the sapid logon screen but credentials for bmays1 or cccc users are considered invalid.
Regards
Mohammed
Exactly Mohammed. Same thing happend with me as well.
I was not able to run this application on local server with all set but I am able to run it on cloud. Not sure about the error.
How do I get a SuccessFactors Developer account? Where do I get to see the integration API's? I see that the SuccessFactors link above requires a login -what is the username and password?
Thanks a lot for the awesome demo! I also want to know how can I get a SuccessFactors Developer account? And where do I get to see the integration APIs? What's the trial account for the API integration? Thanks again!
I can manage to execute the extension app on Hana Cloud Platform. But still not sure how to add it as widget to extend existing SuccessFactors. Is possible to demostrate how to do it?
Cheers,
Richard YAN
Hi RIchard,
One way is to create a "custom tile" in SF V12 Home Page and include the HCP URL in an iframe.
Mohammed
Excellent demo! but now I need to provisioning user accounts from IDM software via custom java connector toward SuccessFactors users. I can't find such API to do that. There is one?
Hello,
we want to evaluate SAP HCP for SFSF LMS.
Does anyone have already experience with the interface between SuccessFactors Learning Management and SAP HCP.
Currently it is not necessary for us to build an interface for bizX.
I do not find any meaningful description for such a learning interface. We want to integrate HCP into learning to meet our requirements.
Thanks in advance.
Kind regards,
Sebastian
Hi,
I am also looking for the API for LMS. Now, I have to fetch the data daily and update them to the schema in HANA db. It is annoying.
Br
Jusitn
Hi there, i tried to follow the instructions provided on GitHub, but the application is not starting within my HCP Trial Account and i am not sure why. Can anybody get in touch with me or provide a clearer Guide?
Thanks a lot
regards
Mathias
This is part of the log:
Error while deploying application with real path '/usr/sap/ljs/webapps/com.sap.hana.cloud.samples.benefits' and web context path '/com.sap.hana.cloud.samples.benefits'org.apache.openejb.OpenEJBException: Unable to load servlet class:
There aare others as well, is this error preventing the startup of the application?
Localy it is neither working..
Hello,
We are a customer, and we have a certified partner helping us with issues with configuration and provisioning in Success Factors.
We want to build applications as extensions in SuccessFactors like “Networking Lunch” only with information inside Success Factors, but I don’t have clear the prerequisites for us like customers and for our partner to do it.
Like customer:
1.We need to pay a licence in SAP HANA Cloud?, It’s a licence for each user that will use it, or only for the development team?
2: We need to pay a licence in SAP HANA Cloud Portal? It’s a licence for each user that will use it, or only for the development team?
3:We could build extensions applications without the support of a partner?
4:We could deploy extensions applications in Success Factors without the support of a partner?
Like partner:
Regards
Salvador
Hi there, I tried to run this sample application. But could not work in local server with the errer like "Uncaught Error: Could not load config file: OData.svc/uiConfig".
Would you give me any suggetion for solving this error,please?
Thanks, and BR
Masashi
Solved it.
Cause is just a difference of SDK version.
Sorry for my previous meaningless post.
Masashi
I followed all the 4 steps to deploy the application on HCP trial. But I always get the "
HTTP Status 404 - Resource not found
"
Can someone who has already deployed help out?
HI,
Great blog indeed.
Can you check if the link demo API access to a SuccessFactors Trial system added in the blog is working ? When trying it redirects to Opensap course ?
I expect a trial system indeed.