Do you want to learn how to extend or develop new applications using SAP Ariba APIs?
Keep watching, you are in the right place.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen from the Digital Partner Engineering team of SAP’s global
partner organisation and in this video tutorial series we will explain how to work with SAP
Ariba APIs.
If you are completely new to the topic, on the ariba.com website, you can find some general
information.
You can watch a short introductory video, or read the data sheet, or register and get
started directly.
The data sheet lists the benefits and features together with the available APIs.
As you can see, there are APIs for procurement, for strategic sourcing, for the Ariba network,
and for supplier management.
For the latest information, of course, we need to go online
The address or URL is developer.ariba.com/api - and this is the, what’s called, developer
portal.
If we go to developer.ariba.com/api, we can register for an account.
Note that this account will be valid for a particular data center.
There is one in the US, in Europe, in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
On sap.com, on the Cloud Status page, for Ariba, we see them listed here.
San Jose, California, for Ariba Network Sourcing and supplier management solutions
(upstream) Procurement and invoicing solutions (downstream).
Same data centers.
The Ariba network is hosted exclusively from the US, so for Network APIs, this is the data
center where we should connect to.
On the European, and the other developer portals, Ariba Network APIs are not listed.
To request an account, click the Sign Up link.
The first one to register needs to be the DSC, the designated support contact and there
is a link that will guide you to Ariba Connect - and then when you select your user, contact,
the DSC will be listed.
Only a DSC can sign up an organisation for access to the developer portal.
So, if this is you, go ahead and provide your corporate email and tick the box that you
agree with the Ariba privacy statement.
If you are not the DSC, get your DSC to do this for you.
Ariba support will validate the request and make the DSC the portal admin for your organisation.
He or she can then create new users, authorise applications, generate api keys, all that.
We will deep-dive into portal administration in a subsequent video tutorial.
So, Ariba is only going to validate the DSC.
Afterwards, it is up to your organisation to decide who gets access to the portal or
not.
Could be corporate users only, could be contractors, your friends, whatever.
That’s up to your portal admin to decide.
OK
SSO is enabled for SAP corporate accounts, so I can connect using the link -
and here we have the developer portal.
On the left pane, a small menu with home, discover, and manage icons.
On the top header, there is Help and Sign Out.
Help > Product Documentation, opens Ariba Connect with some general information about
the portal, a portal guide for administrators, explaining how you can create users, for example,
and a quick start guide for developers.
Then we also have here the documentation, the help, for each of the APIs.
We will look into this, when we discuss each of the APIs in subsequent videos of this series.
The documentation on Home opens the FAQ, if you select Help > FAQ, you get the same page.
As often, this is more of a list of VIQ, very important questions, and it would be a good
idea to actually read them, and make sure all developers understand the essentials.
For example, here we can read about the relation between APIs and CIG, the Cloud Integration
Gateway; where to report issues; how to sign-up (we just explained that); and what’s available.
Development platform: no surprise, the SAP Cloud Platform is recommended, we will cover
this in a future video, but you can also go for Azure or AWS.
The sandbox, OAuth secrets, and so on.
No worries, if you are not familiar with all of this yet, we will get to it in this video
tutorial series.
OK
That’s the FAQ, make sure to read it.
Discover shows us the actual APIs.
These are all REST APIs, maybe good to mention that.
There are also SOAP-based, XML-based APIs, usually referred to as Web Services.
Often considered to be an older generation of web-based APIs.
They are still used a lot, in particular, for integration scenarios, so in relation
with the Cloud Integration Gateway.
We will not cover SOAP in our series.
We will only do REST.
Representational state transfer.
SOAP being short for Simple Object Access Protocol
We are going to assume you are roughly familiar with these architectures and if not, there
are lots and lots of video tutorials on this topic on YouTube.
Nothing to do with SAP, nothing to do with Ariba, per sé.
Just generic development concepts.
OK On the header, we have the different solution
areas, analytics, Ariba Network (only the US, as mentioned), Catalog and Procurement,
and Sourcing and Supplier Management.
Note that the Analytical Reporting APIs: view management, job submission, job results, synchronous
— are also listed under procurement, and under sourcing.
So, we have the same APIs in different solution areas.
This will make things a bit easier.
Integration Monitoring, for example, this API is listed both under sourcing,
and procurement.
Other APIs on the other hand, like Asset Management are unique to a particular solution,
OK Back home
To get started, you will need to create an application, or to be more precise, you will
need an application key For this, click the plus
Enter an application name, and a description.
This will provide you with the application key.
Next, you will need to ask your administrator to request API access
Select Actions In the menu, select the API name
For example, let’s take Analytical reporting Select your realm,
Add a comment, in case you need to provide specific information for the request, and
click submit.
And once this is approved, you will get an OAuth client ID and a secret, and you will
need this to make the actual API calls.
I will copy the API key to the clipboard If we then return to Discover
and select the View Management API, for example, GET metadata
Try it out Required input is our realm
For this trial, any realm will do Product - as indicated, this needs to be analytics
documentType - as indicated, if not provided, the GET metadata will list them all.
plus, we will need to do this each and every time, provide the apiKey
So, let’s paste in and click Execute
Here we have the curl command, so you can run this on the command line as well, often
used for automation tests The response code: 200, that’s an OK
and the response body.
Here we can see documentType Sourcing project fact
Filter fields: load create time, load update time, project id, description, and so on,
listing all fields for each document type If we clear the response, note that we also
have some sample output for 200
for 403 forbidden for 404 unauthorised, and
for 500 internal server error You would need this information to know how
to handle errors in your application.
OK - this was just an example, in the next video we are going to show developer portal
administration, and in subsequent videos explore each APIs in detail.
See you there, Thank you for watching