Introduction
You can use APIs to connect business processes across your system landscape and integrate with external consumers of your services in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
OData and SOAP APIs are provided for Sourcing and Procurement.
You can find the documentation for the whole list of APIs for sourcing procurement in SAP Help Documentation: APIs in Sourcing and Procurement
OData (REST) APIs are designed for synchronous calls. They are used if the sender requires an immediate response to an HTTP request to the receiver. In this communication scenario, the receiver does not necessarily need to know the URL of the sender.
SOAP APIs are designed for message-based communication. Often, this message semantically represents a command message (not a notification), and the sender expects that the receiving system executes on this command. The sender only receives an acknowledgment in the HTTP response and does not expect immediate processing. In Business-to-Business (B2B) communication, in particular, it is common practice to model an explicit response message. This response message is sent from the receiver to the sender in a separate HTTP request once the command message has been processed.
You can use the SAP Business Accelerator Hub to discover and consume digital content packages with APIs, Business Events, integrations, and sample apps from SAP and selected partners.
Note
SAP Business Accelerator Hub was previously called SAP API Business Hub.It helps you to build apps, integrations, and extensions more easily.
You can navigate to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and browse the catalog for the available Service Interfaces (APIs) for Sourcing and Procurement.
By testing the APIs, you can understand how they are structured and whether they are suitable for your business needs.
You can search for APIs and test them using the Try Out functionality with the available sandbox and standard data. You could also test them using your own SAP S/4HANA Cloud System.
The following video provides an overview of the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.
Testing APIs
Once you log on to the SAP Business Accelerator Hub, you can test the APIs using the Try Out functionality which is available on each page of the corresponding API.
To open the corresponding API, you navigate to product SAP S/4HANA Cloud → APIs → API Type on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub. Using the search field, you can search for the API that you want to test on the selected API type tab, for instance ODATA V2. Once you choose and open the desired API you can test the API by choosing the Try Out on the same page.
You can trigger various types of HTTP requests and inspect their responses instantly. An API Key authorizes your API requests and all API responses are in the response body.
The Try Out functionality enables you to:
Select the API and the operation that you want to test.
Add the required parameters based on the operation.
Execute the request.
Inspect the response in the Response area.
You can learn more about SAP Business Accelerator Hub in the documentation SAP Help Guide for SAP Business Accelerator Hub
You can find the sourcing and procurement APIs on SAP Business Accelerator Hub and test them using the available sandbox environment available on the hub. But if you want to test the APIs using your own SAP S/4HANA Cloud system as an environment or to develop applications that access the data on your system, then you have to set up the communication management for your SAP S/4HANA Cloud system. In the next lesson, you will learn how to do this setup.