Introducing OData Adapter & Overview Page integration with Smart Business Service – Part 1

Smart Business Service is a service on SAP Cloud Platform which helps to visualize analytic contents in the form on KPI Tiles or interactive dashboards which support insights to action. It relies on the SAP Fiori Launchpad which is provided by the Portal service on the Cloud Platform. In one my previous blogs, I have outlined the steps required to consume a service from any system which is based on SAP HANA and display the KPIs in the form of tiles on a Fiori Launchpad.

Smart Business Service relies on the OData services which provide the business data. These OData services need to be annotated following OData4SAP standard in order to identify dimensions and measures on each entity.

So, if you are using an OData service based on HANA XS or CDS view, it’s quite easy to add OData4SAP annotations. What if you have a service in SAP Business Suite system or a third-party system which doesn’t come with these annotations. This is where OData Adapter for SAP Annotations in Smart Business Service comes very handy.

When you publish the Smart Business Modeler Apps to your SAP Fiori Launchpad, you will now be able to see additional Modeler Apps in your Launchpad.

You would also notice that are additional apps introduced to create Overview Pages which can display a dashboard consisting of several charts organized in the form of cards. Smart Business Service supports embedding of several chart types within the Overview pages(OVP). The OVP pages can be seen as a step between the basic information on the SAP Fiori Launchpad tiles and the full-blown information within the SAP Fiori applications. Again, you don’t need to write any line of code for this. Everything is taken care by way of configuration. The configurations of existing evaluation are used while displaying the OVP application. To summarize, you can create a KPI tile in the Fiori Launchpad and end users can click on it to navigate to an overview page and from the Overview Page they can drill down into each of the evaluation and view more details using the Generic drill down app.

In this blog, I am going to show how to consume an OData service which is not based on OData4SAP annotations and quickly build a SAP Fiori Overview page. I am assuming you have gone through the previous blogs on how to activate the service and create the basic objects in Smart Business Service.

Create Destination

To keep things simple (and avoid Cloud Connector), I am going to use SAP ES4 system. Create a destination in the Cloud Platform Cockpit as shown below. Remember you need to have your destinations with the name BusinessSystem

Configure Business System

The next step is to configure the business system based on the destination which has been configured. Navigate to the “Configure Service” link in the Smart Business Service and launch the “Configure Business System”.

In the Data Source section, select the Business System created in the destination

In the Service Discovery, select “OData Service Discovery” and provide the relative path for the sample OData service. In this example, I have selected GWSAMPLE_BASIC

Configure OData Metadata

In this section, we will be applying the Annotations to the GWSAMPLE_BASIC OData service. Navigate to the Fiori Launchpad which has all the Smart Business Modeler Apps. Launch the “Configure OData Metadata” app.

Select the Source System and the Service discovery mechanism. It should automatically default the OData service maintained in the earlier step. Once these values are maintained, click on the Submit button.

This will display a table at the bottom of the screen listing all the entities. Under Semantics column, you can either select Aggregation or Parameters. If you want Smart Business Modeler Apps to discover the entities, you need to select “Aggregation”. When you select “Parameters” additional fields show up in the table to support association/navigation. For this example, I am just using the Semantics aggregation and in the Aggregation role column, I am identifying which of the properties are dimensions and measures.

Save your metadata configuration after making your changes.With this, your OData service is ready to be used by the Smart Business Modeler Apps.

In the next blog, I will focus on how to create KPIs and Evaluations in the Smart Business Service which refer to the same OData services (which has been enhanced with the annotations in the above sections)