SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory now includes OData Provisioning service (Cloud Foundry)

One of the much-awaited service “OData Provisioning” is now available in Cloud Foundry environment. Here are more details about this announcement from the Product Management team. This service has been available in the SAP Cloud Platform Neo environment since 2016 and has been one of the highly adopted services enabling customers to quickly connect their backend APIs and build Fiori apps on SAP Cloud Platform. I have earlier written a blog post on the value of OData Provisioning and how it can be used in the Neo environment “Use OData Provisioning and Web IDE to build Fiori Apps”. The good news is that the service on Cloud Foundry environment is in feature parity with the Neo environment and there are plans to offer more capabilities in the near future. The OData Provisioning service in Cloud Foundry environment is offered via the Extension Factory serverless runtime. To know more about Extension factory and the serverless runtime, you can follow this blog post “Using SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, serverless runtime to build light weight extensions”

In this blog post, I would like to show the steps required to configure and use the OData Provisioning service. Below are the high level steps.

Setup SAP Cloud Connector:

Setup you cloud connector and configure a connection to your SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment. Reference blog post “How to use SAP Cloud Platform Connectivity and Cloud Connector in the Cloud Foundry environment”

In the below screen capture, I have exposed a Business Suite system called QKX

Once the connection is established, you should be able to see the Cloud Connector and the exposed systems in your SAP Cloud Platform subaccount (as shown below)

Configure Destination:

Configure the destinations in SAP Cloud Platform. Remember to add the “odc” property as stated in the SAP Help documentation.

Enable Extension Center:

The OData Provisioning service is within the Extension Factory serverless runtime. Hence, we need to enable this service to access this functionality. You can follow the steps in this blog post “Using SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, serverless runtime to build light weight extensions” to enable the service and access the “Extension center”.

Register the OData service:

Once you have enabled the service and assigned yourself the relevant permissions, you can launch the extension center.  Navigate to the “Services” menu within the extension center and click on the “Register” button.

Selecting the destination will fetch all the OData services which are available in the system. Select a service and click on “Register”

Once the service is registered in OData Provisioning, you should be able to view in the Services menu.

Clicking on the service name, will open up the detail screen where you can find more info about the service and also add additional destinations for Multiple Origin Composition (MOC).

You can also view the Service Document from within the OData Provisioning service and also use the configurations menu to change the settings like metadata validation, cache metadata etc.