Name: Working with Virtual Attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud
Uploaded: 2021-12-6
Duration: 537 s
Description: This video demonstrates how to define and configure Virtual Attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud.

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<div><div><div><div><p>This video demonstrates how to define and configure Virtual Attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud.</p></div></div></div></div>

Working with Virtual Attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud

Hi, my name is Carlos and I'm part of SAP Customer Experience Team. This is the second video for the integration API series, where we will cover the usage of virtual attributes. If you haven't seen the previous video where we cover the concept of webhooks in the SAP Commerce Cloud platform, I would recommend taking a peek as we will reuse several resources covered in it. First, I'll explain what virtual attributes are and how they extend the capabilities of the integration API. I'll also explain briefly what the meta API is, and how it can be used in the context of virtual attributes and webhooks. Finally, I will also show you a brief demo on how to create and configure virtual attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud. As I mentioned, virtual attributes allow you to extend the functionality of the integration API using scripts. Vars or virtual attributes are only applicable for outbound use cases and Get requests. Virtual attributes are not part of the type system, but they can be added and configured as part of a type and persisted in an integration object item. You can create virtual attributes for integration objects and add them at runtime. This allows adding a virtual attribute without needing to update the items in XML file and then restart and reinitialize SAP commerce, which saves valuable time. Virtual attributes offer the following advantages. Data formatting. For example, dates and numbers. Payload enrichment for adding details that may not exist on the item type. For example, append a list of coupon codes to a product and payload. Planning for customizing the payload to reduce the number of nested objects. Additional characteristics of virtual attributes are. They do not support auto create, mainly because they are not part of the time system itself. They cannot be part of an integration key. This means there is no option to configure them as unique attributes, and they require unique names within integration. Object items that do not conflict with existing standard or classification attribute names. In version 2011 of the SAP Commerce Cloud Platform, virtual attributes only support primitive types. They can also be created using back office impact files or through the meta API. Note that I'm talking about the meta API. We can define the script service meta API as an element that provides RESTful endpoints to create, read, update, or even delete scripts used for virtual attributes. It is important to mention that scripts provide the backing logic that controls how the virtual attribute is retrieved. It can be accessed via the script service, and it supports the virtual attributes in the get API. Now I'm going to show you a demo on how to configure virtual attributes in SAP Commerce Cloud. First, we will create a script via back office as an alternative. We will also create a script using the meta API. Next we are going to create a virtual attribute via the back office and assign it to an integration object. Finally, we're going to test the integration using an external monitoring site. So let's jump right to it. I'm in the administration cockpit perspective of back office and the first thing I need to do is to create a script and go to the scripting section. Click on the plus sign and define the mandatory fields for my script. This is going to be called var script back office. It will be a groovy script. I'm going to set generic content because I'm going to edit it right now. So I have the details for my script here and I will paste. Piece of code that I created earlier. And if you see the details, what it does is it gets the creation time of an order. It changes the format to a more readable format rather than using the Java format. The interesting part happens here, and this happens because we will assign this script eventually to an integration object. So the item model of the integration object item is going to be passed to this script. We are able to access all the attributes for this specific item, which in this case is an order. We can access its creation time and change the format. I'm going to click on Save and we're done with our script. Now I'm going to create the virtual attribute in an existing integration object. I'm going to switch from the administration cockpit perspective to the integration tool. I'm going to go to modeling, and I am going to select an integration object that was created on the webhooks video. And this is just for time purposes. So if you check this option in the menu right here I have an option that says Create Virtual attribute. So I'm going to click on that option. And then I need to select a virtual attribute descriptor. I don't have one created right now but I can create it in this same menu. I'm going to assign a descriptor code for this. This is going to be the attribute descriptor back office. I need to select my script which is the one that I created earlier. VAR script back office the descriptor type. In this case it's string and we can define an alias. But I am going to leave it blank for now. Maybe I was created and save my intuition object. And if I go to the bottom of this list, I'm going to see my var script. Your back office created already on that integration item, and it's defined as virtual. This is one alternative to creating virtual attributes via the back office. But there is another alternative where we can use the meta API instead of using back office. I'm going to jump to postman. I have it open right here, and the first thing that we need to do is to use a meta API to create this script, which is a first step that we defined. We use the following Uri, which is our OData add to web services, slash script service slash scripts. And what we are doing here is with the payload, we are creating a new script with a code var a script meta API its content, some default parameters. In this case, we don't want it to be auto disabled, and we don't want it to be disabled in start and the script type, which is a groovy script. We're going to execute this post request to this Uri, and we get a status to a one, which means the request has been fulfilled and a new resource has been created. If I jump back to the administration cockpit on the scripting menu and I update, I will see that the new script that I created through the meta API is here and with its content already. The second step that we need to follow is to create the virtual attribute descriptor and assign it to the integration object, again via the meta API. So I have another Post request prepared here with a different Uri slash OData to web services slash integration service slash integration objects on the integration object with the code my orders IO that has the following definition of integration. An object item in this case is the order. I want to assign the following virtual attribute, and the definition for that virtual attribute is going to be the name written or VA meta API, and the definition of its retrieval descriptor, which in this case has a code, a logic location, which is the script that I created with the previous post request. And its type, which is string. I'm going to execute this post request. I get up to a one, and if I jump back to the integration UI tool and I see that now I have another virtual attribute called VA, the API of type string, which is the one that I created through the meta API. If you remember on the previous video on webhooks, I created a webhook that triggers when an author is either created or updated. Since I am using the same integration object and the same configuration, I am going to place an order. And we will see the changes on the webhook. I'm going to see two post requests over here. What I will see is that now on the payload I have two additional fields called VA the Scripture back office and VA API. If you compare with the format that we have on the creation time and modified time, we see that by default the date included here is formatted in a Java format. While we defined our virtual attributes with a more user friendly format, you can see the difference here. And you can see that now the creation time and modified time are different. Don't forget to check helpdesk sap.com for additional resources.