Consumption of S4/HANA in CAP/HANA Cloud

[lachlan-smith]

Following on from the call for suggestions in Thomas's "Help Shape A New SAP HANA CAP Sample" video.

We have been building a project internally based on CAP and Fiori which involves consumption of data from S4/HANA. Currently we are using Smart Data Integration (SDI) to achieve this, however I have noticed a number of limitations to this approach. For example, using the SDI HanaAdapter driver does not appear to support exposing ABAP CDS views through to HANA Cloud.

Another issue we ran into was the inability to call ABAP functionality over RFC, as it appears the node-rfc package does not currently support Cloud Foundry (See SAP-archive/node-rfc#145)

It would be good to get some direction from SAP on what the best practice for implementing solutions that involve consumption of data and logic from S4/HANA systems (and S4/HANA Cloud too?) as it seems a lot of the current documentation and example solutions focus more on standalone solutions, where as we see a lot of value in being able to provide solutions that can work alongside existing S4/HANA systems.

Being able to augment and enrich the S4/HANA experience and allowing customers to "dip their toes" into the Cloud Foundry landscape, offers a tremendous value add without requiring the same level of commitment to the environment as a fully standalone solution would (Especially with with the option of pay as you go billing for the BTP services).

[jung-thomas]

We could look into some of those topics in the future - although probably as standalone content and not directly added to this sample. However you might also want to look at the SAP TechEd 2020 Developer Keynote.
https://github.com/SAP-samples/teched2020-developer-keynote
We do a lot in the keynote for extensibility although not necessarily the exact things you aske about here.. We use the message bus (SAP Event Mesh - formerly Enterprise Messaging) to push the process along and exchange data between parts done in different programming Models. In particular in the ABAP portion you might be interested in how to extend a standard API with additional customer fields.