SES 23: Sales Order Fulfillment App

Usually, all SAP Smart Business apps drill down from one analytical app to another. However, Sales Order Fulfillment App is one of a kind hybrid app, that drill down from an analytical app to a transaction app.

This is the only hybrid app that uses SAP Gateway and SAP HANA XS. It uses SAP Gateway to sends requests to the back-end server. Once the Sales Order Fulfillment App is configured, it will be added as a tile in SAP Fiori Launchpad. And when the user clicks and opens the tile, a transaction app is opened. Hence, this is the only hybrid app which has a tile of an Analytical app but launches with features of a Transaction app.

So far, we’ve given step-by-step instructions on how to create an Analytical app with the help of SAP Smart Business Modeler. We showed you how to create a KPI to provide authorization to a user and its drill down views. In our recent blogs, we also showed you how to enable an app with custom groups and catalogs. We also provided an overview of analytical apps which don’t use KPIs to launch. Thus, it’s time to dive into OData services.

Introduction to OData Services

The OData is an open standard with Open Data Protocol (OData) that was built on technologies like Atom Publishing Protocol, HTTP, XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Navigation), to access data from a number of applications. OData was first designed with an objective to provide a REST API and assigning it to the corresponding HTTP header. One of the striking features of OData services is that they are multi-channel and have been developed to serve many applications. Thus, OData is used to modify and access information or data from various sources. OData service is a logical data model which depicts how users perceive model behind the UI. Anything and everything that is possible with UI, becomes a part of API and each OData service is represented with service root URI.

Documents Accompanying OData Service

• Service Document: It gives details on set of entities like Products, Product Images, Partner Address, Sales Order, Order Items, Product Attributes and Customers.
• Service Metadata Document: This one shows structure of an OData service. It shows entity data model (EDM) of the source. Here, the data is described in terms of EDM using XML.

OData Service Queries

Here is the list of various requests used for entities:

• Use a GET request, to read a single entity.
• Use a PUT request, to modify a single entity.
• Use a POST request, to create a single entity.
• Use a PATCH request, to modify the whole entity.
• Use a DELETE command, to delete an entity.
• To merge a subset of entity properties, use a MERGE request.

OData services use a simple query language that allows client to request random pages, filter or sorts.

Some of the important query options are as follows:

Operation	Query Option
Paging	$page
Sorting	$orderby
Filtering	$filter
Inlining	$expand
Projecting	$select