SAP Gateway Introduction

The growth of the mobile device sector is driving the demand for new innovative applications for business and enterprise.

The large number of developers who are developing these applications very often have knowledge of technologies such as .NET, JAVA, and HTML5, but without a strong SAP background, they would need an interface to the SAP Business Suite systems to develop for SAP platforms.

Mobile access to complex enterprise systems and expanding business data requires that SAP customers can manage and control mission-critical systems, and deploy innovative solutions at the same time.

SAP Gateway is an innovative solution for simple and robust business enterprise mobile access.

Key Challenges in Enterprise Computing for Business Consumers

The problem in the past was that for different consumers a developer had to build a specific integration scenario that used its own protocol. However, one-off applications specific to each device or platform were not transferable. For example, a solution built for browser-based applications could not be used for the integration of enterprise software. The solution is to use one protocol, the OData protocol.

The Solution: OData

OData was originally invented by Microsoft and shared through the open specification promise. It has become an industry-standard; the latest version, version 4 is an OASIS standard, which is now driven by SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and a number of other companies.

SAP Gateway is used by SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA to publish OData services built on top of the ABAP application server. SAP Gateway enables consumption of SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA data for people-centric applications across multiple channels.

What is OData?

The most important point is that the OData service forms a kind of contract between the non-SAP side and the SAP side, helping to bring together developers on both sides.

OData Benefits

Based on Representational State Transfer (REST), OData provides compelling benefits for SAP application development, which include the following:

• It is relatively lightweight and builds on the HTTP protocol allowing database-like access to data via the web.
• In addition to being an industry-standard protocol for creating and consuming data APIs, the OData protocol became an Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard with its latest version, OData v4.
• OData allows for a decoupling of the data provisioning from the UI designers by providing a contract between the non-SAP developer or UI designer and the SAP developer.
• Because it is supported by various platforms, it supports multichannel access to SAP Data.
• It has been broadly adopted; the main drivers are SAP, Microsoft, and IBM.
• The standard address representation or resource is the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
• OData supports two formats for representing the resources it exposes; the XML-based AtomPub format and the JSON format.

SAP Gateway Features

The service builder is a new and useful transaction that allows you to develop OData services for the SAP Business Suite in a very convenient way. You can even generate OData services without the need to write a single line of code. This is achieved by leveraging an existing Remote Function Call (RFC), Business Application Programming Interface (BAPI), or Search Help, and performing a service implementation by mapping.

SAP has also invested time and resources in frameworks. SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM), and SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM) have a lot of business objects that are based on frameworks such as GenIL or Service Provider Infrastructure (SPI). This means that you can use a wizard to easily generate an OData service based on one of these business objects.

In addition, we offer access to analytical data that is particularly useful for mobile devices, making it very easy to generate an OData Service based on Easy Queries or MDX Queries data without having to write a single line of code.