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Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
You are watching a video tutorial that is part of a series about the SAP Business Technology
Platform, SAP Extension Suite certification.
The topic of this tutorial is web development standards.
This video was recorded in May 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
As a reminder, we covered this in the introduction, here are the topic areas of the certification.
The web development standards topic carries an 6% weight, about 5 questions, a minor topic.
As with other topics, the exam page does exactly explain what is meant with “web development
standards” nor provide any examples, so we have to look at the training material and
deduce or guess that this references OData, APIs, and JSON/YAML.
What is OData?
Or rather, what do we need to know about OData?
The best way to REST.
A protocol to query and create data over HTTP; building and consume RESTful APIs.
If you are completely new to the terminology, REST and OData, there are some tutorials on
the odata.org website you could consider to go through.
You can also look it up on Wikipedia, of course, covers service documents and metadata documents,
resource operations: get, post, put, patch, delete, querying, ?$top=2, resource representation,
how you get the data back as JSON or XML, Atom.
This might all be a bit abstract.
Recommend to go through the Introduction to OData tutorial on the SAP Developers website
and also the deep-dive, which covers creating an OData backend service using Business Application
Studio, we covered in a previous video, and CDS, core data services, which is also on
the menu.
Next, APIs.
Again, you can look this up on Wikipedia, for a more theoretical discussion, out of
scope for the exam.
There are also many “what is an API” tutorials on YouTube.
What you need to know, can be found here, on the SAP API Business Hub, api.sap.com
Listing SAP products, for example S/4HANA Cloud.
For which we have APIs, events, CDS views, integrations, adapters, and more.
APIs come in different flavors: SOAP, OData, v2, v4, REST
Make a selection, lets take Activity Type.
For each API there is business documentation.
There is an API specification, which you can download, in JSON, YAML, or EDMX format, we’ll
get to this in a minute.
There is an API reference.
Here we have the CRUD operations, as they are called: GET POST, PATCH, DELETE
The resources, for example, A_CostCenterActivityType, which we can try out, here in a sandbox environment,
with the OData parameters $top, $skip Run
Returns a response with a return code: 200 in this case, all is well, a response body
and a response header.
Now, for some this may be a little bit too much information.
No worries, just retain that there is such a thing as the SAP API Business Hub and that
you, as developer, can use this resource, to discover and explore the APIs of SAP applications.
Then we need also need to briefly cover JSON and YAML
Again, for the details see the respective websites; json.org and yaml.org.
Lots of information also on Wikipedia, of course.
Like OData, both standards have been around for some twenty years.
Nothing new.
YAML is typically used in configuration files, originally to simplify XML, making it easier
to read and work with.
YAML is a superset of JSON, at least the latest version, with some differences: YAML supports
comments, starting with the # (pound) sign, JSON does not.
Here are two examples: JSON, compared to XML and YAML.
Okay, so much for this very brief overage of the web development standards topic, OData,
APIs, YAML, and JSON that is; only a couple of things you need to know, which we covered,
lots more to learn of course, with the tutorials of the SAP Development Center warmly recommended.
You can find the links to the resources mentioned in the description of this video below.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
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