Hi, welcome back to our video tutorial series about developing applications with SAP Ariba
APIs.
I am Denys van Kempen from the Digital Partner Engineering team of SAP’s partner organisation.
In previous videos of this series, we explained how to get started with the developer portal
and how to work with the Oauth tokens in Postman.
For this video, I am going assume you are familiar with these topics, so we can dive
straight into our APIs.
Time of recording is November 2019.
For updates, please check the SAP Ariba API playlist on our YouTube channel.
OK I am connected here to the Developer Portal,
United States Data Center developer.ariba.com/api
Here, under the Discover menu, we find all the available APIs
and for this video, we will continue with ANALYTICS, on the first tab.
Analytical Reporting - View Management In the previous video, we discussed the GET
metadata API.
For this video, we will address viewTemplates.
There are two GETs and two POSTs.
With the first POST we can create a view template and with the second POST, a patch, we can
do an update.
Normally, you would use the PATCH verb for this, so PATCH instead of POST but this works
a bit differently and we look into that in a minute.
Let’s start with the GETs. /viewTemplates will get us all views
and /viewTemplates/viewTemplateName just the metadata for a single view.
viewTemplates requires two parameters: realm and API key
As the list for all views of a customer or realm can be quite long, we can also provide
a page token so we can paginate.
Here we have the sample output for 200, successful response
this just returns the view template name and any filter expression with creation date with
the output for 403, 404 and 500 - these are usually pretty much the same for GETs.
To get a single view metadata, we add the view template name to the path, and this returns
the same metadata, this time for the template we requested.
No surprises here.
Let’s proceed with the POST.
It is the same URL.
But now we need to provide a body with the document type, a status, the selection attributes,
filter expressions,
and if all is well, we get a 200 back with the message view template is created/updated
successfully.
There is a 400 message in case of invalid select attributes, and the 403 and 404s are
the same as before.
Finally, we have patch; /patch is appended to the URL, it is not a verb, it is still
a POST.
And with patch we can change the status for the view template to either published or deactivated.
If you want the template to have the draft status, you should define this in the original
POST when creating it.
Quick reminder If you want to know more, see the documentation.
It is on Ariba Connect support.ariba.com
Here under Analysis API help you can look it up
For those more familiar with the SAP documentation, there is good news.
As we find the same information also on help.sap.com Just search for ariba API
and select the Ariba API portal page and open the Analysis API from there
Same information, maybe a litter better presentation, but this might be a personal preference.
OK Let’s run this in Postman
Here we have our Postman collection Links to the GitHub code source repository
below on the description of this video when watched on YouTube.
View templates Let’s first get our oauth token
We have covered this in a previous video.
Same for working with environment variables in Postman.
Let’s start with get all views.
URL is /viewTemplates Parameters are realm and an optional page
token In the header we need to provide our API key,
and our oauth token.
Click send This will take a bit of time actually.
4.4 seconds a lot of metadata
and if we scroll all the way to the bottom, here we have a page token.
and this we can pass in the URL to get the next page
and the next, and so on
OK let’s copy a view template name
Next, we are going to use the URL for a single view
/viewTemplates with the name of the view template name appended to the path.
Let’s paste that in here.
Send and now we have the metadata for just this
one view template with the document type, select attributes,
and so on.
OK Let’s proceed with the POST call
creating a view template URL remains the same but now we do a POST
Same parameters realm and the view template name
in the header our API key and in the body, the document definition
document type status
select attributes, and filter expressions
Now, when the view already exists we get a 400 bad request message
view already exists So, lets change the name here
and now we have a new view template I have set the status to draft
so in the Ariba UI we could test this out. and when all is well, we can do an update
same URL with /patch appended The verb is still POST, do not confuse this
There is a PATCH verb as well but we are not using that here.
realm, template name api key
and in the body, just an update for the status: published or deactivated, as documented
Send 200 OK
and the status has been updated.
OK, that’s it for view templates.
In the next video we will continue our exploration of the Analytics API and take a look at the
jobs.
Thank you for watching