SAP Cloud Platform – Connect to Outlook mail using Open Connectors

SAP announced the new ‘Open Connectors’ service in SAP Cloud Platform last month. I tried my hand with the Outlook mail connector in the Cloud trial account. I found it easy to connect and integrate third party cloud applications using Open Connectors.

SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors simplifies and accelerates connectivity to third-party cloud applications. It provides robust, feature rich, pre-built connectors to an extensible library of over 150 of the most popular third-party cloud applications.

There is a blog series by Divya Mary – https://blogs.sap.com/2018/09/19/part-1-enable-sap-cloud-platform-open-connectors-in-trial/ in which she connects HubSpot with SAP Cloud platform. You can read her blog series for detailed information behind some of the steps covered here.

In this blog, I will explain the steps to consume APIs from Outlook mail through pre-built connector.

You will need the following:

1. A trial account in SAP Cloud Platform (Neo) (http://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com)
2. ‘Open Connectors’ service is enabled in your trial account. Refer https://blogs.sap.com/2018/09/19/part-1-enable-sap-cloud-platform-open-connectors-in-trial/ for the steps.
3. An Outlook email account for authentication.

Once you have all these, you are good to go. It takes just a few minutes to set up and test the integration.

1. Login to SAP Cloud Platform Trial account and go to ‘Open Connectors’ service.

2. Click on ‘Connectors’ to view the catalog of available connectors. Hover over the tile for ‘Outlook Email’ and click on ‘Authenticate’. This will retrieve the oAuth keys which will be used for authentication. This is done by signing into your outlook mail account.

3. Click on ‘Create Instance’.

4. You will get the following screen, once the instance is created. Now we can test the Mail APIs before integrating them with API Portal. Click on ‘Test in the API docs’ tile.

5. Scroll to find ‘Get /messages’ under messages. Click on ‘Try it out’.

6. You will be presented with all the parameters you can pass to make the API call. Notice that the Authorization field is pre-filled.

7. Let’s try to get all the emails with a subject that begins with ‘STICKET’. This is done by entering the where condition. As the documentation suggests, the condition should follow CEQL search expression. Click on execute. You can see the response with the list of emails that fit the given criteria.

Notice the curl command with the harmonized RESTFul URIs to your third-party application and the normalized authentication token.

Try posting a message/sending an email from the connected account.

Note: Copy the entire CURL command and keep it. We will need the URL and authorization token to connect from API proxy.

Now let us consume and manage the connection to the third-party mail application in SAP Cloud Platform API management.

8. Login to the API portal and create an API proxy with the details below.

9. Go to Policies. Select ‘PreFlow’ under  ‘ProxyEndPoint’. Add  ‘Assign Message’ Policy (from Mediation policies).

10. Add the following code to the policy.

<!-- This policy can be used to create or modify the standard HTTP request and response messages -->
<AssignMessage async="false" continueOnError="false" enabled="true" xmlns='http://www.sap.com/apimgmt'>
 
	<!-- Sets a new value to the existing parameter -->
	<Set>
	<Headers>
	    <Header name="Authorization">User XXXXX, Organization XXXX, Element XXXX</Header>
	</Headers>
		</Set>
	<IgnoreUnresolvedVariables>false</IgnoreUnresolvedVariables>
	<AssignTo createNew="false" type="request">request</AssignTo>
</AssignMessage>

Replace the Authorization value in the <Header> tag with the value from the CURL command.

11. Update the policy. Save and Deploy the API proxy.

12. Let’s test the proxy. Go to Test console in the API portal. Click on the API proxy we just    created.

Make sure you remove the ‘/SwaggerJSON’ at the end of the url and click on ‘Send’. This will try to retrieve all the mails. It returns around 200 mails. We can set the pageSize parameter while calling the API.

13. Add a ‘where’ condition to filter the emails being retrieved. Now, it will retrieve only the emails that satisfy the condition. (I tried the ‘orderBy’ parameter. It did not work for me. I am investigating this issue).

14. Finally, try sending an email. Choose Post and enter the body of the request.

{
  "Body": {
    "Content": "test "
  },
  "Subject": "Subject from API",
  "ToRecipients": [
    {
      "EmailAddress": {
        "Address": "xxxx@xxxx.com",
        "Name": "Sharadha"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Click ‘Send’

15.  Notice the status code – 200 as response.

16. Check for the email in the recipient mail box.

Let me know if you have any questions. Have fun exploring!