In many situations, a scenario may span multiple systems or applications. Take a scenario like employee onboarding, for example, with multiple steps and spanning several different applications that need to be connected one to another.

Thus, no matter for customers or partners, they have strong willingness to make the integration between SAP systems and any other third-party systems. In this way, they can optimize business processes and increase efficiency to a great extent.

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) provides powerful and out-of-the-box integration capability to make it, that is SAP Integration Suite.

SAP Integration Suite combines the integration capabilities such as Cloud Integration (Process Integration), API Management, Integration Advisor, and Open Connectors into a cohesive and simplified toolkit for enterprise integrations. To provide a comprehensive integration experience, these services are not available separately, but only as part of the Integration Suite service plan.

The Integration Suite includes all integration capabilities in simple service plans. To know more on these plans, see Integration Suite service catalog.

In this post, you can know how to use the vital Cloud Integration (aka CI or CPI) in the Integration Suite on SAP BTP to exchange data securely between different systems. We will take SAP BTP@AliCloud as data center to use Integration Suite, SAP SuccessFactors as the end SAP system to explain integration work.

You can do the integration work with CPI via the following steps:

1. Analyze and dissect your scenario to detailed steps.

2. Discover API for SAP systems in SAP API Business Hub according to your detailed steps.

3. Set up SAP system

4. Set up CPI and design integration flow (iflow)

Prerequisites

Scenario

This post would expand based on the following scenario, which doesn’t have real business meaning and just for your reference:

Discover API for SuccessFactors in SAP API Business Hub

In the SAP API Business Hub, you can discover and try out APIs that are provided by SAP solutions including SuccessFactors.

In our scenario, we can find an APIs collection: Common Platform APIs.

API on Photos can be found in the API reference tab and you can try it out online here.

Set Up SAP SuccessFactors

Step 1: Enable SAP SuccessFactors API Services and Required Languages in Provisioning

Certain features need to be enabled in Provisioning to integrate SuccessFactors with other systems.

Log on to SuccessFactors Provisioning as Employee Central Provisioning Expert. Under List of Companies, select the relevant company name.

Choose Company Settings.

Scroll down and enable the following features under Web Services:

• SFAPI

• Employee Central SOAP API

And make sure Disable OData API is not selected.

Choose Save.

In the Confirm Changes dialog box, enter the company ID and choose Confirm.

Scroll down and enable the Language Packs in your system.

Choose Save Feature.

In the Confirm Changes dialog box, enter the company ID and choose Confirm.

Step 2: Create SAP SuccessFactors API User and Granting Permissions

Log on to the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Admin Center as an Employee Central Administrator. In the Tools search field, enter Employee Export.

Specify export option Short format: only system fields. Leave all other settings as default. Select Export Template and save the file on a share in unicode (UTF-8) format.

Enter the following information and leave all other fields empty:

Field Name	Value
STATUS	active
USERID	SFAPI
USERNAME	SFAPI
MANAGER	NO_MANAGER
HR	NO_HR

Save the file.

In the Admin Center Tools search, enter Import Employee Data. Choose Basic Import, browse for the filled file, keep file encoding Unicode (UTF-8). Validate the import file before finally importing it.

After the user is created, select Manage Permission Groups in the Admin Center Tools search.

Select Create New and enter the following values:

Field Name	User action and values
Group Name	for example, Tia Group

In the Choose Group Members section, assign the newly created user SFAPI. Select Done.

After the permission group is created, select Manage Permission Roles in the Admin Center Tools search.

Choose Create New.

Enter the following values:

Field Name	User action and values
Role Name	For example, Tia Role
Description	For example, API LoginPermission

On the Permission Role Detail – Permission Settings screen, choose Permission. Change the Administrator Permissions according to the following table:

Change User Permissions according to the following table.

Select Done.

Assign this role to the group created in step 4 and set Target Population:

Select Save Changes.

Select Reset User Passwords in the Admin Center Tools search. Enter first name, last name, or user name to find the SFAPI user. Select this user and enter a new password. Then select Reset User Password.

Perform a check of your new SFAPI user and password:

• Log on to the SuccessFactors instance using your new SFAPI user and password.

• Check whether the logon is successful. If you are asked to reset the initial password during the logon, provide a new password and note it down.

Step 3: Set SAP SuccessFactors API User Logon Exceptions

This step describes the necessary setup steps to ensure that the password for the SAP SuccessFactors API (SFAPI) user does not expire.

Log on to the EC Admin Center as an Employee Central Administrator. In the Tools search field, enter Password & Login Policy Settings. In the resulting page, choose Set API Login Exceptions. Make the following settings:

Choose Save and Close.

Test API

Through the above steps, the API user has the full permission for SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central integration. Then, we can try to call it via Postman.

To construct the endpoint URLs, the necessary API server URL can be found in the List of SAP SuccessFactors API Servers.

For example:

Get Request

Get userId / personId:

Get photo:

Or, you can provide your credentials by manually encoding your credentials (<username>@<companyID>:<password>) using Base64 format and then set it as a authorization header.

For more information, visit https://help.sap.com/viewer/d599f15995d348a1b45ba5603e2aba9b/latest/en-US/5c8bca0af1654b05a83193b2922dcee2.html.

Post Request

Upload photo:

Set Up SAP BTP Integration Suite, Cloud Integration

Step 1: Design Integration flow

With tested APIs and by following the designed scenario, you can leverage CPI to make it happen in a low-code way.

Note: OData adapter doesn’t support incoming payload in JSON format. The adapter only supports payload in XML format. So, in the integration flow, you can realize the step in two ways:

• Preprocess the payload by converting it from JSON to XML.

• Use HTTP adapter instead to get around the limitation:

  

Step 2: Trigger Integration flow

Before:

After:

A notification email would be sent:

Useful Links

Help Portal – SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite OData API: Developer Guide (V2)

Help Portal – SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite OData API: Reference Guide (V2)

Best Practice – JB1

SAP API Business Hub – SAP SuccessFactors API Packages on SAP API Business Hub

Help Portal – List of SAP SuccessFactors API Servers

Blog – SuccessFactors: all you need to know about Authorizations and Security

Help Portal – What Is SAP Integration Suite?