Activating the APIs in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

APIs are the gateways that allow external applications to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

By default, APIs are not enabled in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant. To use an API, you must first activate it and assign users with permission to use it.

Before you can activate an API, you must identify a related communication scenario.

A communication scenario is a logical object that groups together inbound and outbound communication design-time artifacts.

Each API can be bound to one or more communication scenarios. You can find this information on the specific API page in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

Conversely, when you search for a specific communication scenario in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub, you can see a list of the APIs associated with that communication scenario.

To integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud with other systems and exchange data, you can use the communication management apps.

To use these apps, you must assign yourself the Administrator business role (SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR). You can do this using the Maintain Business Users app.

There are predefined communication scenarios for different use cases, such as integrating employee data between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors. These scenarios are mentioned in the API overview page in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

You can also create your own custom communication scenarios using the Custom Communication Scenarios app.

To establish secure communication between your solution and other systems, you can follow these steps:

1. Create communication users for inbound communication using the Maintain Communication Users app.
2. Create a communication system using the Communication Systems app. This represents the system you want to communicate with. If the selected scenario contains inbound services, select the user for inbound communication that you created earlier. If the selected scenario contains outbound services, create a new user for outbound communication.
3. Create a communication arrangement using the Communication Arrangements app. Select the communication system that you created earlier. The information about the user for inbound communication will be populated automatically. If several users for inbound communication exist for the system, you can select the appropriate one. Otherwise, the first user in the list will be selected automatically. If the selected scenario contains outbound services, you must enter the outbound user information manually.
4. Click Save to activate the communication arrangement.