SAP and OData V3

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Anybody else already tried to talk to SAP with an OData connection? Seems that SAP only can process V2 OData and Mendix V3 which not seem to be backwards compatible. Anybody now of a work around? Regards, Ronald
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4 answers
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There may be a workaround depending on what you are trying to achieve: currently the only difference between v2 and v3 as used by mendix is the version number in the $metadata document i believe. The actual data should be the same, as it's based on a atom feed format.

So you could try to download the $metadata document, change the version number and feed that to the tool that you are connecting with the odata service. From there on you should be able to connect to the existing odata resources.

As said, currently the only difference is the version number, but there are significant differences between version 2 and 3. If we add functionality that is impacted by the differences, we would need to implement it twice, for version 2 and for version 3. Instead of moving backward, we would rather move forward to version 4.

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Sorry, I only implemented SOAP webservices to communicate with SAP. What is your usecase?

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Hi Ronald, I realize that you have likely resolved this already, but thought I would just share my experience in connecting to SAP (NW Gateway System) via Odata. As with most things SAP related, there were a couple of complexities :)

The scenario we created is as follows:

  1. A Odata service is published on the SAP Gateway system (we created a custom one specifically for our needs)
  2. We used a 'GET' from the Mendix REST Module, where we specifically requested the SAP response as JSON (use the URI parameter $format=json)
  3. We used the addCredentials Java action for basic authentication to connect with SAP Gateway
  4. By creating the non-persistable entity model definition 'correctly', we were able to 'extract' the response into the entity for use within Mendix

Json Response from SAP

So while this is not 'using' Odata in a traditional sense (traversing embedded hrefs and deep linking) in the traditional sense, it is possible to extract information relatively easily from the backend SAP system.

Mendix Microflow

Hope this helps. Warren

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This is actually not correct, We have mostly developed our OData connector against OData services that are published and available in SAP Api Hub and as far as I can recall all of those services are either OData V3 or V4. I'm very curious where you have found SAP V2 Odata sources.

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