[SAP HANA Academy] Live3: Web Services - Using OData

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[Update: April 5th, 2016 -  The Live3 on HCP tutorial series was created using the SAP HANA Cloud Platform free developer trial landscape in January 2015. The HCP landscape has significantly evolved over the past year. Therefore one may encounter many issues while following along with the series using the most recent version of the free developer trail edition of HCP.]

Continuing the Live3 on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform course the SAP HANA Academy’s philip.mugglestone provides a closer examination of the previously setup OData web services by running some example queries. Watch Philip's tutorial video below.

(0:20 –  4:20) Viewing Meta Data and Entities in JSON Format

Running the services.xsodata file has generated a URL based on the trail account (p number), SAP HANA instance (dev), project (live3), and file (services.xsodata). Calling the file lists out the existing entities (Tweets, Tweeters, TweetersClustered and Clusters).

With OData we can make requests via URL based syntax. For example appending /$metadata to the end of the URL displays the full meta data for all of the properties within each entity. The data you get from OData is self referencing and is very important as SAPUI5 can read this meta data automatically to generate the screens.

Be careful when looking at the individual entities in OData as there may be 100,000s of, for example Tweets, and you don’t want to read them all. So appending /Tweets?$top=3 to the URL only displays the top 3 Tweets in XML format.

The XML format appears a bit messy so you can convert it to JSON format by adding &$format=json to the URL. By default the JSON format isn’t as readable as possibly desired so you download for free JSONView from the chrome store in order to display it in a nice readable format.

To see only certain parts of an entity's data, for instance the id and text columns, you can append &$select= id,text to the URL. This returns only the id and text values, as well as the meta data for the Tweets entity.

(4:20 – 6:30) OData's Filter, Expand and Count Parameters

Philip next shows the data for his Clusters entity by adding /Clusters?$format=json to the URL. Similar to a where clause in SQL, Philip filters his results by adding &$filter=clusterNumber eq1 to display only his first cluster.

To see the Twitters association from the Clusters entity Philip adds an expand parameter by entering &$expand=Tweeters to the end of the URL. This returns all of the information for each of the individual Twitters in cluster 1.

To see the number of rows for an entity add /$count after the entity’s name in the URL.

Follow along with the Live3 on HCP course here.

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