Connecting to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

  • Published on May 7, 2024
  • 5 minute(s) read
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Introduction

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is a solution based on SAP's S/4HANA Cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, and is designed to be easier to implement and operate than other S/4HANA editions. With this simplification, the integration mechanisms that SAP partners have relied upon for many years have been limited. For example, with ERP 6.0, S/4HANA on-premise, and S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, integration is often achieved using RFC or a direct database connection, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 - Conceptual view of an SAP system and traditional integration mechanisms.

RFC

The Remote Function Call (RFC) mechanism invokes SAP or custom function modules directly within the application layer of the SAP system. These function modules provide rich functionality with the benefit of adhering to the system’s comprehensive data integrity controls and business processes. Invoking BAPIs and sending IDocs to an SAP system are also performed using the RFC protocol.

Database

Direct database access via an SQL connection using APIs such as ODBC, JDBC, and .NET allows large datasets to be extracted from the SAP system in the most efficient manner. Database access is generally read-only and only if the customer has the required full-use database license. This mechanism does provide an easy way to extract data from large transactional data tables, but it is becoming more common to find that a customer does not have the permitted database license to allow this type of access.

Extracting Data

With S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the RFC and direct database connection mechanisms are not available to use, however alternative integration mechanisms are available.

SAP has been gradually adding additional integration mechanisms into their flagship ERP products, and now all editions of S/4HANA support REST, OData V2, OData V4, and SOAP APIs. Full details of all the current APIs and capabilities are available at SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

One common use of the RFC and database connection mechanisms is to extract data from the many SAP tables that make up the internal SAP data model. SAP partners have built a library of content and solutions using these internal tables, but with S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, the RFC and database connections are not available and neither is direct access to the tables that make up the internal SAP data model. However, SAP has added a virtual data model that is designed for data access for external solutions and APIs. This virtual data model is implemented using CDS Views (more correctly they are called ABAP CDS Views, which are not the same as HANA CDS Views). Refer to S/4HANA Cloud - VDM and CDS Views for details.

The data exposed by CDS views is from the internal database tables, but uses business semantics and is in theory, easier to consume. An S/4HANA system provides thousands of delivered CDS views, and customers and partners can create their own. In an S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system, it is only possible to create new CDS views using existing CDS views as their source, so it is not possible to create a CDS view to simply expose an internal table. It should be possible to access all the required master, configuration and transaction data via CDS views.

CDS views are available to use directly within the S/4HANA system, and some SAP tools can consume them natively, for example SAP Datasphere has tight integration to consume CDS views. Unfortunately, the interface that is used by Datasphere is not available for third-party use, and SAP recently released a note to clarify this, 3255746 - Unpermitted usage of ODP Data Replication APIs. CDS views are consumable outside of the S/4HANA Cloud system using OData V2. When creating a CDS view, defining the scenario as External API creates an OData V2 service that can be consumed by third-party tools, and this service can be used instead of RFC or database connectivity to extract data.

Figure 2 - Creating a Custom CDS View

External tools can extract the S/4HANA system’s data using the OData V2 protocol. OData services publish metadata and use a standard approach, and many tools and libraries support OData.

Figure 3 - Extracting data using CDS views via OData

Loading Data

S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has various APIs that can be used to load data for specific business processes, but for mass loading of data in a new implementation, Migration Cockpit is the only option as it has full coverage of data objects.

Migration Cockpit supports loading data from spreadsheets (Excel XML format), CSV files, and a remote HANA Cloud database. The database option is the most practical when used in a well-defined data migration process as third-party tools can connect and write directly to the migration cockpit staging database. The staging database can be any HANA Cloud database and a connection to it is configured in the S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system (using SAP_COM_0678).

Figure 4 - HANA Cloud database used as the Migration Cockpit staging area.

Connecting to S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with Syniti ADMM

ADMM does support the connectivity required to mass upload and extract data from an S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system. The connection to the Migration Cockpit staging database is a typical HANA connection and all our components support that. The extraction via OData is currently not natively supported by our platform, but as we provide Syniti Connect to ADMM customers, that can be used for this type of connection.

Syniti Connect is the name we use when we provide Boomi to our customers. Boomi is an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and gives us the capability to connect to many system types and technologies. It has generic OData connectivity, and also a specific connector for SAP S/4HANA OData V2 services.

Figure 5 - ADMM Connection types used with S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition