Technical Articles
Connector Builder – Resources Screen
Connector Builder – Part 3 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.
Resources – Third Screen
The Resources screen is where you can create resources (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE). You can create the request and response models, chain resources together, incorporate prehooks and posthooks, and enable bulk for the created resources.
Add a New Resource
Adding a resource is where you will add the CRUD operations for the objects in the vendor API. Let’s explore adding a REST resource, a SOAP resource, and how to view the actual vendor request.
Create a PreRequest Hook and/or a PostRequest Hook
Whenever you need to change anything in the request or the response (path, headers, body, etc) in a more complex way than you can do directly in the UI, a prehook or a posthook, written in JavaScript, will be of use. The following link will explain how to create a hook and provide some examples:
PreRequest and PostRequest Hooks
Create a Request / Response Model
An important facet of any API is the ability to expose metadata. For example, data scraping applications will expose all the fields for an object and then populate the data. Most often metadata is not static since it will include custom fields, that can be arbitrarily named.
By adding a request/response model, the bulk resources can be enabled. Also, the resources present on all Connectors, namely GET /objects and GET /objects/{objectName}/metadata will function.
How to add a Request or Response Model
Enable Bulk
After a response model is created, bulk can be enabled for an object.
Chain Resources Together
Chaining resources comes in handy when something from the response of one resource is needed to call another resource.
How to Chain Resources Together