From Olingo to Cloud SDK: make sense?

[mxiccato]

Hi community!

I'm trying to understand if it would be convenient for me to "update" my way to develop oData services in Neo environment... Actually, I'm using Olingo 2 library with JPA Processor, so it is easy for me to create entities and access related table via oData services (CRUD operation automatically managed by Olingo library).

I'm trying to understand if it would be worth for me to use SAP Cloud SDK; from what I read, I could be interested in:

• oData vModel (now I'm using other Java libraries to consume external services, such as UNIREST);
• Resilience / Caching / Other cool functionalities;

Issues (fully related to my actual situation, not general issues):

• CAP could not be used in NEO, from what I know;
• I do not want to re-implement all needed CRUD operation already exposed automatically via Olingo;
• I do not want to use oData v4 because I cannot adapt all front-end applications already developed;

I found lot of references to oData VDM (the way to consume oData services) in SAP Cloud SDK; not so many references, instead, explaining how to expose an oData v2 service; It seems possible with SAP Cloud Platform SDK for service development (no recent references, by the way... Now it should be included in CAP); Reference: https://answers.sap.com/questions/744270/using-the-sap-cloud-platform-sdk-for-service-devel.html

So my questions at the end:

• Is there some documentation somewhere on how to link entities to odata v2 in SAP Cloud SDK (just as in Olingo jpa processor)? With SAP Cloud SDK it seems easy to write your own handlers, but nothing will be done automatically, am I right?
• In this specific case, it is worth not to use Olingo and use the SDK?
• Why should I use oData v4? Which are the advantages respect to Odata v2 both in back-end (Java application) and front-end (Fiori) applications?

I hope you could help me in understanding the big picture,

Thank you so much!

Manuel

[dhem · Accepted solution]

Hi Manuel,

Here's my 2cts on the issue:

The SAP Cloud SDK's goal is it to make it easy to consume OData services, either in the form of the pre-delivered clients for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (these are what we refer to as the Virtual Data Model/VDM), or in the form of client you generate on your own, using the generator package.

Having said this, whether it makes sense for you to adopt the SAP Cloud SDK is a question of what exactly you're trying to achieve. If you want to consume services, it probably will not get any easier than with the SDK (assuming you haven't implemented consumption yourself yet). If you want to expose services, you can use the SDK for Service Development (which the SAP Cloud SDK does already use under the hood), but I cannot comment whether this is the easiest or even the recommended way on Neo.

Regarding your first question, I'm not sure whether I understand what you mean by "link entities to odata v2 in SAP Cloud SDK". Can you go in a little more detail here?

Finally, on OData v2 vs v4: As far as my knowledge goes (and I don't think that is exhaustive here), OData v4 gives you more possibilities in how to build queries. For example, in v4 you can add filter clauses for entities you expand to, which gives you more fine granular control over how much data is returned. There are more differences, a quick search produced this article, for example.
When it comes to UI5, I have no idea, to be honest, but I'm guessing that whatever version of UI5 you're using, it will either work with v2 or v4. But that's really just a guess.

Hope that helps!

Dennis