Explore SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views on SAP API Business Hub

This blog post describes how to explore all CDS views from SAP S/4HANA Cloud on SAP API Business Hub.

Introduction

Core Data Services (CDS) views are semantically rich data models, providing highly efficient built-in functions like aggregations, annotations, and conceptual associations. You can create custom CDS views for released views and expose them as a read-only OData service that delivers data tailored to the needs of your external application.

Problem Description

There are plenty of CDS views delivered by SAP to the customers and partners and the numbers are growing rapidly. However, finding the CDS views for your business use case was challenging, and unearthing it as per consumer requirements was a tedious task.

You will learn

• Overview of SAP API Business Hub
• Discover published SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views.
• Details of CDS Views and business documentation.
• Viewing CDS Views in View Browser application.

Prerequisites

• You have an SAP API Business Hub account (optional).
• You have an SAP Cloud trial account (optional).

Solution

SAP API Business Hub acts as a central place to discover SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS views available to the customer which end-users can explore, extend, and adapt SAP S/4HANA Cloud with built-in and side-by-side extension capabilities. These details can help customers or partners to search available CDS views and consume them.

Let us deep dive to see how this can be achieved:

1. Go to SAP API Business Hub by firing the below link
   SAP API Business Hub:  https://api.sap.com/
   You would be able to land on the home page of the SAP API Business Hub.

2. Switch to the Categories tab and you could see the available artifacts such as APIs, Integrations, Workflows, CDS Views, and so on. If the CDS Views category is not shown, click on view all to see it. On the tile of the CDS views, you would be able to see the total available CDS view on SAP API Business Hub.
   
3. You will be able to see all the CDS Views available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. You can use the search bar to find CDS View which you are looking for.
4. If you want to see them segregated based on the area or Line of Business (LoB), switch to Packages Below is the list of available packages as of today’s date.
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for R&D/Engineering
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Finance
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Database & Data Management
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Human Resources
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Manufacturing
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Cross Applications
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Sales
   • SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views for Sourcing & Procurement
5. Click on any CDS View Package tile to see CDS views that belong to that area. Let us click on Finance package for example. You would see the list of CDS views that belong to the Finance area. Each of the tiles represents a single CDS View.

6. You can switch to the Overview tab to see the basic details of the package and the other necessary information.Moreover, you can go to the Document tab to see the necessary documents and references to explore further.
7. Click on the CDS View tile under the CDS Views tab to see more details about specific CDS View. For single sign-on enabled users, you would be logged in to your SAP API Business Hub account and land to the CDS view the main page. Other Users would be redirected to the SAP API Business Hub Login page where they can log in using their credentials and new users can register themselves.
   CDS view main page looks as shown below:

Launching business documents will redirect you to the SAP help portal (help.sap.com) for the respective CDS view.

8. You can also click on the Show in View Browser button if you wish to open this CDS view in the View Browser application where some additional information is available. If you already have a SAP S/4HANA Cloud Trial then you would be able to land on the main page of the CDS View in View Browser application else follow the below steps if you want to create a SAP S/4HANA Cloud trial account and view the details of a CDS view in the View Browser application. This trial instance will be available to you for 14 days. Once you have registered, you should receive an email acknowledgment.
   • Visit the SAP S/4HANA Cloud page and choose Start a free trial today.
   • On the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Trial page, choose Register for Free. The End-user license agreement page appears.
   • Acknowledge and accept SAP Cloud Trial Agreement. The Welcome to your free trial page appears and you receive an email acknowledgment

9. You can now go back to the opened SAP API Business Hub tab and click on the CDS view tile to see its details in the View Browser app.
   

Conclusion

This blog post should help you discover SAP S/4HANA Cloud CDS Views on SAP API Business Hub.

Note: SAP S/4HANA CDS Views (or On-Premise CDS views) are not available on SAP API Business Hub as of now but the code lines for both flavors of CDS views are similar and hence you would be able to find the same CDS views in SAP S/4HANA systems as well but not necessarily all of them.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. Thanks for reading this blog post, hope you enjoyed it.