Describing Open Connectors

You want to provide various third-party APIs within your company, centrally. This access point is designed to provide standardized APIs in an uncomplicated way.

Connectors are pre-built API integrations that enable a connection into a specific API Provider endpoint (for example, Salesforce, Quickbooks, or Marketo). All connectors start with a normalized set of features, including authentication, resources, paging, errors, events, and search. At the hub level, SAP also seeks to support the richer set of APIs that an application provides, even when not all the connectors in that category share that resource. For example, Salesforce Sales Cloud has APIs that many other CRM services do not support. You can find these APIs that are specific to just Salesforce in the documentation for that connector.

You can find these APIs that are specific to just Salesforce in the documentation for that connector:

• Connectors share common services including discovery, search query, pagination, bulk uploading and downloading, logging, and interactive documentation.
• Methods are normalized and accessible through RESTful APIs.
• Complete data payloads are returned in JSON and available to transform and normalize to a common resource.
• SAP keeps each connector up-to-date with changes at the endpoint.
• Each connector is a multi-tenant connector supporting an unlimited number of authenticated accounts with no additional code required.

SAP Open Connectors is built from the ground up to bring API integration and management together with a data-centric approach.

The platform, combined with more than 160 unique connectors, is designed to unify the developer experience across all kinds of applications and services, regardless of the application’s backend, REST, SOAP, proprietary SDK, database, and so on. SAP Open Connectors creates a unified API layer and standards-based implementation across every environment. This ensures that developers, integration users, and their use cases are decoupled from the backend services on which they rely.

SAP Open Connectors is being used to access data from non-SAP applications using harmonized APIs from CRM Hubs. These harmonized APIs are managed by the SAP API Management capability where all the security best practices and governance policies can be applied. Finally, an SAP Fiori application displays this harmonized data from any of the non-SAP CRM applications of your choice. A high-level solution blueprint of this sample application is captured in the figure, Use Case 1: Access Data from Non-SAP Applications.

SAP Open Connectors is used for the connection to LinkedIn. The provided harmonized API is used via Cloud Integration to send a message to LinkedIn.

The main features of SAP Open Connectors are as follows:

• Use the pre-built connectors in your integration scenarios
• Design and implement complex integration workflow templates
• Define your resource and create mappings to your cloud apps
• Extend a connector or build your own
• Use SAP Open Connectors Query Language for querying
• Use the SAP Open Connectors bulk services to upload and download data in bulk from an endpoint in a normalized way
• Configure security settings and set up your users and accounts
• Use the SAP Open Connectors events framework to receive notifications about resource changes
• Use OAuth Proxy to have multiple environments, such as development, QA, and so on, with one endpoint application

Watch this video to see an example of how to simplify connectivity to third-party document storage application from SAP Open Connectors.

SAP Open Connectors enables connections to more than 160 third-party APIs. Based on this, it creates a standardized REST/OData interface that is easy to use. Especially in combination with SAP API Management, a central API Business Hub Enterprise page can be created.

• Access SAP Open Connectors on SAP Help portal for a complete overview.
• Find numerous examples of replicating in Tutorial Navigator.