1 Introduction
Mendix apps can consume OData services exposed by SAP back-end systems. To do this you need to use the SAP OData Connector.
The SAP OData Connector needs to know details of the OData service which has been exposed. This involves mapping the data structures exposed by the OData service (via the $metadata URL) to entities and attributes of the domain model. This information is created as a Mendix module (.mpk) file which can be imported into your Mendix app.
Any OData service can be used to generate a data model using the SAP OData Model Creator. See How To Use the SAP OData Model Creator for instructions on how to do this.
SAP OData Model Creator and SAP OData Connector only support SAP OData Gateway Services which use OData version 2 or version 3. OData version 4 is not yet supported.
2 SAP Data Models
The Data Model module contains up to four resources which help to consume the OData Service:
- Domain Model
- Service Root
- Entity Set Names
- Function Names
2.1 Domain Model
Each Mendix SAP data model has a domain model that describes the information in the OData service. The domain model consists of entities and their relations represented by associations. For more information, see Domain Model.
Do not change the names of entities, attributes, or associations in the Domain Model; they need to match the names used by the SAP OData service for the SAP OData Connector to work correctly.
2.2 Service Root
The module contains a constant whose value is the service root of the OData service. For example, the GWSAMPLE_BASIC data model, generated from the SAP Catalog Service using the SAP OData model Creator has a Service Root which is the constant GWSAMPLE_BASIC which has the value https://sapes5.sapdevcenter.com:443/sap/opu/odata/iwbep/GWSAMPLE_BASIC.
2.3 Entity Set Names
The enumeration EntitySetNames contains a list of the collections in the service. These are entities which can be queried to produce a list of matching objects.
2.4 Function Names
The enumeration FunctionNames contains a list of functions which are exposed by the OData service. To assist in using these functions the domain model will also include an entity for each function, suffixed with the string Parameters, which is used to provide the required parameters to the function.