Technical Articles
Connector Builder Guide – Setup Screen
Connector Builder – Part 2 of a 3 Part Instruction Guide
Open Connectors consists of over 170 connectors to 3rd Party Applications natively embedded in the SAP ecosystem. If the Connector you need does not exist in the catalog, you can build it quickly with Connector Builder. This instruction guide will walk you through using this tool, with concrete examples throughout. The beginning, Part 1, can be found here.
Setup – Second Screen
The Setup screen consists of the Properties, Authentication, Configuration, Parameters, Hooks (Prehook and Posthook), and the Event Configuration (polling and webhooks).
Properties
Using the Jira API as an example:
Base URL: This is the portion of the URL that is used for every call. The rest of the vendor path is added in the actual resource on the next screen, the Resources screen.
Pagination Type: Four options are provided – page starts with 1, page starts with 0, offset, and cursor. For JIRA, we’ll set it to offset. Clicking on the offset link will provide further explanation.
Pagination Max: This is the maximum number of records returned per call. The default value is 200.
Content-Type Header and Accept Header: Both offer the options of application/json or application/xml. This is matched to the native vendor API. This can be overridden in the parameters section (either the global parameters which live on this Setup Screen, or the parameters that live on a resource on the Resources Screen).
Authentication
The authentication types currently supported out of the box are: Basic, Oauth 2.0, Oauth 1.0, Oauth 2 Password, AWS v2, AWS v4, WS Security, and TLS. There is also a Custom option for all other types of authentication. The links here provide in-depth, examples.
Configuration
The connector configuration is the storage place for any data that you need to operate on with parameters and hooks. If the API provider requires something specific with each request, you can add that to the configuration and then define a parameter that passes the data with each request. You can expose the configuration to the user so that they can supply the information when they authenticate, or you can store a default value in the configuration to act on later.
The following links will explain how the Configuration works:
Create a Configuration Variable from User Supplied Information or a Default Value
Store Response Data to the Configuration
Parameters
The Parameters on the Setup screen of Connector Builder are global parameters which means they are sent with every resource created in the Resources Screen. They can be overridden or modified at the Resource level however.
The following links will explain how the Parameters work:
Using a Configuration Value in a Parameter
How to Populate all or Part of the Base URL with a Configuration Value
Hooks (PreRequest and PostRequest Hooks)
Hooks act as request “middleware” and can be used to programmatically manipulate requests made to or responses coming from this connector. Hooks applied at this level are global and will be applied to every request. If you’d only like to manipulate certain requests, add a hook on that resource on the next screen, the Resources screen.
The following link will explain how to create a hook and provide some examples:
PreRequest and PostRequest Hooks
Event Configuration
Events allow the Element to capture changes, and either send them to a Callback URL provided during Element Instance creation to trigger a Formula with them. If a vendor API sends webhooks when a change occurs, the Element can receive them. Otherwise, the Element will have to poll for changes.
