SAP API Business Hub - 3 awesome little features

[svenhuberti]

If you read these lines, you are certainly familiar with the SAP Cloud Platform and its integration services. So you know that the API Business Hub contains a lot of predefined content for the actual integration services like: integration flows (integration service), mappings (integration service), policy templates (API management service), events (enterprise messaging service), ...

But did you know that when you log in into the SAP API Business Hub, you get awesome additional features? Let me describe these in this blog post.

Favorites

Once you have signed in to the SAP API Business Hub, you can add Favorites. To do so, simply click on the star icon of the content you want to add.

For instance, you may want to use the workflow service in your projects, and check its API documentation on a regular basis.

Simply search for "workflow" in the API Business Hub, and click on the right entry:



Once you display the API's details, you can also add it to your favourites!

Simply click on the little star icon at the top.



Now you can directly access this API through the "My Favourites" Link on the left-side menu of the API Business Hub.

Subscriptions

If you had a close look at the workflow service API, you may have seen the little envelope icon next to the favourite button.

This envelope button lets you add the API to the subscribed artefacts for which you will now get updates for.



You can access your subscribed artefacts under the Favourites menu point.

Environments

Let's now have a look at the last nice feature of the API Business Hub: the environments.

If you have clicked on a specific API of the workflow service (eg. "Workflow API for Neo") you have seen that you can test it against a sandbox environment.

But it would make much more sense to test the API against your own environment. To do so, you will define an environment by clicking on the "Configure environment" link.



The environment window pops up and you can start filling in the details of your own environment.



Note that you need to know a couple of details about your environment, like the DC, your provider account name and consumer account name.

For the workflow service, simply check the "bpmworkflowruntime" destination in your SAP Cloud Platform cockpit. The URL contains both provider- and consumer account name:

https://bpmworkflowruntime<providerAccountName>-<consumerAccountName>.hana.ondemand.com

Once you have entered the resting technical details like authentication credentials, you can select to apply this environment for all the APIs of the package (makes sense) and to save your environment for later usage (strongly recommended).



Et voilà! Now you can use your own environment when testing the APIs of the SAP Cloud Platform Services!



Not only will you now see the results from your own environment in the API Business Hub, you will also see the code snippets tailored for you.

Last words...

Very often, after demoing this to my customers, they ask:

"Could we also publish our APIs on the SAP API Business Hub?".

The answer is simple: you can create you own "API Business Hub" by using the SAP Cloud Platform API Management Service. This is actually the service that is powering the SAP API Business, with a few enhancements here and there.

Happy coding!

[nabheetscn]

Wow did not know they existed, always needed but overlooked. Although i feel Favorites and Spaces should be displayed at the top so that it catches every one attention. Right now it is displayed at the bottom and no one notice them--> User Experience issue?.  Just to add API cockbit is pretty handy to see all the active subscriptions.

 

[svenhuberti]

Hi Nabheet,

good to see that I could draw you attention on this.

Yes, that is more a usability question. But now you know where to find it 😉

Regarding the API Cockpit, it's another topic altogether. And because it is still Beta, I won't comment on it.

BR!
Sven

[former_member626472]

Hi Sven, great read! I have a question- you mentioned that you can use SAP Cloud Platform API Management to create something similar to the API business hub. In one of your feature spotlights for API business hub, you discussed the ability to use environments. Is it possible to use environments in Cloud Platform API Management? If not, is there a similar way to implement the quick and simple authorization that the “Environments” feature provides? I do not see any features like this, however I am using a trial account in the neo environment. Not sure if this would cause the option to be hidden, if it exists at all.

[svenhuberti]

Hi Braiden,

unfortunately, the "Environment" feature is not available in API Management.

However, when you implement the API Management developer Portal for your own company, you may want to setup additional "Sandbox API Proxies", which will point to your TEST backend systems oder mock-ups. Doing so will enable your developers to test against a PROD-like system without having to set it up on their own.
Also note that you can define specific access rights in the Developer Portal so that you can define different groups accessing different API Proxies, ie. different backends.

However, In regards to your question, I will ask Product Management if "environments" are planned in API Management. If yes, I will edit this answer.

Cheers,
Sven

[Aaron_Ambrose]

As this is one of the top search results for a problem I helped a customer with recently, thought I'd add on some insight from our project.

The customer was trying to test and generate code snippets to interact with the Workflow service on the CF environment. They had created a Service Key for their workflow instance but were not able to use it as expected, and received various errors from the API Business Hub, all pertaining to authentication issues.

As per the documentation (Though hidden very well!), if the workflow service has been bound to an App Router, then creating and using new Service Keys for the instance will not work.

To resolve the problem, we had to use the service information from the Referencing Apps section, and the relevant App Router application. This application was automatically bound when we set up the Workflow service in conjunction with a Fiori Launchpad and set of SAPUI5 applications.