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Personal Insights
Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
Piotr Tesny
March 31, 2022 5 minute read

myBank with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, APIM and Appgyver

This brief is to showcase how one can implement access to any inbound ODATA or REST API by leveraging SAP Appgyver’s intrinsic Data integration capabilities.

We shall see how this can be done using the BANK_0002 API (S4HC) against a productive S/4HANA Cloud system.
Pre-requisites:

  • Admin access to a S/4HANA Cloud public tenant. Alternatively access to S/4HANA Cloud sandbox environment on API Business Hub.
  • Access to SAP API Management tenant (a BTP-trial account IntegrationSuite trial plan will do)
  • Access to SAP Appgyver composer (community edition or via SAP development lobby)
  • Optionally, access to https://developer.swift.com/reference and SAP IBAN service (in beta) https://help.sap.com/viewer/product/IBAN_SERVICE/Latest/en-US.

Good to know:

Disclaimer:

  • The ideas presented in this blog are personal insights thus not necessarily endorsed by SAP.
  • Please note all the code snippets and gists are provided “as is”.
  • Images/data in this blog post is from SAP internal sandbox, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.
  • Access to some online resources referenced in this blog may be subject to a contractual relationship with SAP and a S-user login may be required. Always refer to T&C.

Before we start…

An aerial view of S/4HANA Cloud APIs.

With a whooping […] and counting business APIs, there is an ever growing number of these APIs that support the principal business user propagation out-of-the-box.

(this is with either OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion or SAMLAssertion authentication flows)

Good to know:

  • However, even if the above still does not hold true for all the APIs, quite a large number of APIs supports x509 client certificate authentication (albeit with regard to a communication user).
  • At present, the customer influence portal is conducting a S/4HANA Cloud campaign focused on the APIs without any upvoting threshold, namely https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/campaign/1175

Let’s have a look at the line-up of the S/4HANA Cloud APIs on SAP_API_BUSINESS_HUB .

Good to know: As the SAP API Business Hub offers its own ODATA catalog service we shall be using it for APIs browsing and discovery as follows:

Additionally, the APIs can be broken down by subtype as follows:

SubType Count TOP 10
ODATA 218 https://api.sap.com/odata/1.0/catalog.svc/ContentEntities.ContentPackages(‘SAPS4HANACloud’)/Artifacts?$format=json&$filter=SubType%20eq%20%27ODATA%27&$select=Name&$top=10
ODATAv4 196 https://api.sap.com/odata/1.0/catalog.svc/ContentEntities.ContentPackages(‘SAPS4HANACloud’)/Artifacts?$format=json&$filter=SubType%20eq%20%27ODATAV4%27&$select=Name&$top=10
SOAP 262 https://api.sap.com/odata/1.0/catalog.svc/ContentEntities.ContentPackages(‘SAPS4HANACloud’)/Artifacts?$format=json&$filter=SubType%20eq%20%27SOAP%27&$select=Name&$top=10
TOTAL 676 https://api.sap.com/odata/1.0/catalog.svc/ContentEntities.ContentPackages(‘SAPS4HANACloud’)/Artifacts/$count

Q: Is there an easy way to know what authentication methods are supported, what communication scenario are involved, etc ?

A: Indeed, it is fairly easy to [programmatically] retrieve a given API characteristics merely by its catalog name…for instance:

With merely knowing the name of an API the API definition can be looked up on API Business Hub as follows: https://api.sap.com/api/{<Name>}/overview,

for instance, https://api.sap.com/api/BANK_0002/overview

Likewise is the possible to retrieve an openapi definition by its mere name, in either json or yaml format, as follows:

Putting it all together.

Step1. The communication arrangement (S/4HANA Cloud)

Let’s create a new communication arrangement based on the Bank Integration communication scenario for the following API, namely BANK_0002

Please refer to the following gist for further details.

Step2. myBank API proxy (SAP API Management)

Let’s implement S/4HANA Cloud myBank API with the OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion flow by leveraging API Management.

The end game is to be able to fetch the EDMX metadata using the API Proxy URL below:

https://<API Proxy hostname>/xxxx/BANK_0002/$metadata

Good to know:

  • myBank API proxy has a built-in CORS policy where additional headers can be added or removed

Please refer to the following gist for further details.

Step3. Create a front end web application (SAP Appgyver)

SAP Appgyver offers a so-called “zero lock-in” approach to data. In other words your data never hits Appgyver backend servers.

All you need to do is to expose your backend functionality with either ODATA or REST APIs.

and voila…

Please refer to the following gist for further details.

Conclusion.

Last but not least, I hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Please provide your feedback in the comments section below.

 

 

Appendix

A case for SAP API Management as a framework to implement your extensions with S/4HANA Cloud

Q. What is the key advantage of using SAP API Management (APIM) to implement extensions with S/4HANA Cloud ?

A. There are several ones.

  • First of all there is no code to be written at all.
  • Furthermore, one can group S/4HANA Cloud APIs (including combining different authentication methods) into API Products and publish the API Products into the Developer portal.Then developers can create applications subscribing to the API Products.

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      3 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Saumitra Deshmukh
      Saumitra Deshmukh

      Great information Piotr Tesny

      Author's profile photo Mustafa Bensan
      Mustafa Bensan

      Hi Piotr,

      You have provided some valid reasons for using SAP API Management for S/4HANA Cloud Extensions.  However, I am wondering though for Step 2 above, is the reason for using API Management because AppGyver does not support the OAuth2SAMLBearerAssertion flow directly, which in contrast is supported by the Destination concept on BTP without the need for API Management?

      Since API Management is no longer sold as a standalone product and now bundled with SAP Integration Suite, this adds significant cost for deploying AppGyver integrations with S/4HANA Cloud in a production system.

      Regards,

      Mustafa.

      Author's profile photo Piotr Tesny
      Piotr Tesny
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Mustafa Bensan,

      Thanks for reading my blogs. Indeed, there is no such a thing as one size fits all.

      I personally strongly adhere into the paradigm of the separation of duties.

      IMO, front end applications should be isolated from the backend services and LOB applications as much as possible.

      That approach also enables the concept of plug-and-play.

      And there is a number of ways to develop front end applications in the SAP ecosystem.

      For this brief I picked SAP Appgyver because it is the no-code part of the LCNC paradigm. With APIM being the low-code asset management tool per-se.

      And there are new upcoming SAP Appgyver features: https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=73554900100800003801&range=CURRENT-LAST#;INNO=000D3ABE772D1EDC92ED963C569BFD1E

      I hope that helps...regards; Piotr

      PS.

      On a side note I have written tons of blogs where I explore the integration/extensibility patterns leveraging BTP destinations (https://blogs.sap.com/2021/06/06/quovadis-or-how-to-find-your-destination/).

      So watch this space for yet another one...quite soon...