Name: Using REST APIs with SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management
Uploaded: 2020-8-21
Duration: 336 s
Description: This video introduces you to key concepts you’ll need to know when using REST APIs with SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management. You will become familiar with the components of APIs, learn about basic authentication, you’ll take a look at basic API calls and response codes.

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<div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><p>This video introduces you to key concepts you’ll need to know when using REST APIs with SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management.  You will become familiar with the components of APIs, learn about basic authentication, you’ll take a look at basic API calls and response codes. </p><p><br></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Using REST APIs with SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management

Hi, my name is Lily!  In this video, I’ll introduce you to some key concepts you’ll need to know for using REST (or Representational State Transfer)  APIs with SAP Commissions. APIs with SAP Commissions. We’ll start with the components of REST APIs.  We’ll then move on to the basics of authentication.  We’ll go over common API calls, and finally, we’ll talk about the parameters you can include in an API call. To give you an idea of the visuals of REST APIs, we will be using a platform for  API development, which will allow us to set up authentication, send API calls and see results. We’ll then finish up with a look at the response codes you’ll receive from API calls. Let’s take a look at how APIs work, so we know how to make them work for us.  To make an API request, the browser needs four things. First is the URL, which is the web address for the object you want to access.  Next is the request method. The method tells the server what it should do.  Think of a method as a verb!     The header tells the system the basic information needed for the request: things like whether the format is for mobile or desktop,  the time, and the size of the request body.  This type of data is called Metadata.   Finally, the body contains the information that we want sent to the server.  Now we want to enable authentication with your Commissions client.  There are several ways to do this.   Two of these are, Basic Authentication and Open Authorization (OAuth for short).  Basic Authentication only requires username and password.   OAuth is an authorization framework for REST APIs that allows limited access to a system’s resources  without giving away a password.  OAuth 2.0 is used most often. Here’s an example of Basic Authentication.  Let’s look at request methods in more detail.  While APIs have a lot of possible methods, in the world of data integration there are only four that we’ll need:  GET, POST, PUT,     and DELETE. GET asks the server to retrieve a resource.  POST creates a new resource; for example, if you’d like to add a new sales transaction, you would use the POST method. PUT modifies an existing resource. Using the same example, if you need to update a sales transaction by changing the value,   you would use the PUT method. Finally, DELETE does just what it sounds like: it deletes a resource or record. Here’s an example of a simple API call. This call returns all records in the Participants table. Let’s look at some variations on this by adding some parameters.  Parameters are additional information you can pass in the call along with the URL to give more specific results.  Some common parameters you’ll use are versions, skip, top, filters, and sorting. You can add “versions” to the end of the URL to return all the versions.  Here’s the same URL we called earlier, with the versions parameter.   The “id” is the sequence number of the resources, in this case the Participant, that retrieves all versions of that payee. The “id” is the sequence number of the resources, in this case the Participant, that retrieves all versions of that payee. Three pagination fields allow you to fine tune which resources are returned by a call. SKIP allows you to skip over the number of records you indicate in a set. TOP allows you to indicate how many resources you’d like to return in a set . The maximum allowed is 100. Inline count allows you to indicate whether the call should return a count of records. Here’s an example of a URL that skips the first ten records and returns the next ten, using a combination of skip, top, and inline count.  Here’s an example of a URL that skips the first ten records and returns the next ten, using a combination of skip, top, and inline count.  Another common parameter is filtering.  Use filters to reduce the number of rows returned based on a set of criteria.  In its most general form, a filter contains a field, an operation, and a value.  This list shows the operations used to perform a filter. For example, here’s how we would retrieve only participants with the last name Bates. API uses response codes to tell if a call was successful or not. If not, what went wrong.  You’re probably familiar with error 404, right? That’s an API response code meaning the resource was not found.  There are a number of other response codes that you’ll want to know when making API calls. Here are a few. 200 means the operation was successful.  304 means the operation was successful, but the data was not modified.  400 means the request was bad, generally due to incorrect syntax, while 404 means the resource was not found. Let’s recap what we looked at in this session. We started with the components of REST APIs. We then looked at common authentication methods.  We went over the four common API methods: GET, POST, PUT, and Delete. We looked at the parameters used in API syntax. Finally, we looked at the response codes returned by an API call. Thanks for watching!