Welcome to the second installment of this blog post series where I interview SAP Cloud Integration practitioners, developers, architects and enthusiasts about what their favourite feature of the platform is. This time around I have the pleasure of talking to SAP Mentors alumnus and my former colleague Daniel Graversen.

Could you introduce yourself briefly, please?

My name is Daniel Graversen and I have worked with SAP integration since SAP XI 3.0. I’m the founder of Figaf, where we work with automating SAP integration tasks such as testing, DevOps and migration to SAP Integration Suite.

Thank you! On to the central question of this blog post series: What’s your favourite SAP Cloud Integration feature?

The part that I enjoy most from SAP Cloud Integration is the APIs.

Why that particular feature?

I come from the SAP PI/PO world, where there were originally no APIs. I remember looking at TPZ transport files from SAP PI to see if I could extract something useful, which is a real challenge. And then making sense of the data was another challenge on top of that.

In SAP Cloud Integration it is all much more focused on APIs. HTTP-based APIs existed from the very beginning, when the design time was created in an Eclipse plugin. Later on, the APIs have evolved to OData, which gives a lot of options for e.g. querying.

Having access to APIs makes it a lot easier to build apps that handle your specific way of doing integration.

You can see all the APIs in the SAP API Business Hub. This makes it easy to find the different APIs and understand what they can be used for. This makes it so much easier to create the application or improvement that you need.

Some examples:

• Find messages processed in a specific period
• Report errors
• Update an iflow with a new resource
• Build your own DevOps process

We all use CPI Helper, which uses a number of the APIs to function. And Figaf is also leveraging the APIs to make our processing of transports, testing and monitoring work. In fact, I think we are probably using most of the SAP Cloud Integration APIs that exist.

How do you see this feature evolving going forward?

I would love to see SAP work with an API-First approach. Currently there is a difference between some of the OData APIs and the APIs used in the WebUI. I think that gap will shrink and hopefully eventually disappear, so that the same APIs will be used everywhere. At Figaf we have suggested a few improvements of the APIs, that hopefully will be implemented in upcoming releases.

Thank you for your time, Daniel – it was great talking to you as always!