ABAP

In an interconnected enterprise runtime, SAP is no longer an isolated platform. Modern business processes rarely live inside a single system — they span many cloud services, external partners, and third-party tools. To make them work together, systems need to talk to each other, and the language they use is HTTP. Why do we need HTTP calls? Almost every service on the internet exposes its functionality through a REST API (a set of web addresses you can call over HTTP). This is fantastic for us as ABAP developers: if a system offers a REST API, we can connect to it directly from our ABAP code. And the two data formats these APIs speak are almost always JSON (the modern standard) or XML (the classic, still common in SAP-to-SAP and SOAP scenarios) — exactly the two formats we will learn to handle in this guide. ...

Core data services (CDS) are the backbone of the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP). They define our data models, push logic down to the SAP HANA database, and cleanly express relationships. When data lives in standard tables, a standard CDS view stack (interface/projection views) combined with standard managed query capabilities works beautifully. But what if your data does not live in a standard table? What if it requires a web service API call, complex procedural computation, or access to Clean-Core-restricted objects via legacy function modules? ...