OData vs BAPI in SAP environment

Question

Whatever we can do with OData, we can able to do using BAPI right?

So,what's the main thing which OData is having compared to BAPIs ?

Please let me know your views

Answer 1

BAPI

• SAP-proprietary
• Based on RFC, an SAP-proprietary protocol
• Fixed input structure (no URL with flexible query parameters)
• Fixed output structure (structures, tables, but not a dynamic number of each)
• Manual documentation describes the service's structure for humans only
• Conclusion: Good for connecting SAP systems to each other

OData

• Open Standard
• Based on REST, the web's de facto standard protocol for app integration
• Flexible query language (filter, sort, expand, associate, search)
• Flexible output (entity, entity set, expanded entity)
• Metadata document explains service structure in machine-readable format
• Conclusion: Good for connecting SAP systems to SAPUI5 and similar UIs

The main thing OData gains over BAPIs are flexibility, open standards, and machine-readability. This may come at the price of speed.

This comparison is slightly off. While BAPI was invented to connect servers, OData is rather used to connect servers to clients. Even though OData's inventors may have had server connections in mind, pure REST has become the de facto standard for connecting this level. It would therefore be cleaner to compare BAPI to REST, and maybe related standards such as web services.

It is possible to emulate OData over a BAPI interface: (URL query) string in, (JSON result) string out. You could therefore conclude that the two are equivalent in terms of power. However, the underlying protocol is different, and systems are more likely to recognize the HTTP protocol underneath REST than SAP's proprietary RFC protocol.

Answer 2

from a functionality point of view, a BAPI can be more specific and tailored to your use case than an OData data source. But OData is a standard, which means you get lots of tooling during client development for free, for instance an OData js client library. You can use frameworks that can use OData data sources, instead of programming against the individual BAPIs you made or SAP provides.

Client developers may not be familiar with the intricacies of each and every subsystem they have to fetch data from. You have the business knowledge you need to take care of and the technical dependencies that have to be met. You could expose a set of standard BAPIs to get to a similar point (if you ignored everything that isn't SAP), but OData is just that. A standard interface where at least the technical part is shared between data sources.

Whether you see the value in OData depends on where you come from. If your requirement is to develop a single, highly focused client application that reads and writes data from and to a SAP system, BAPIs may very well be the easiest choice. But if you have to setup some kind of CEO dashboard that integrates multiple data sources and displays all kinds of operational statistics, like sales data, production interruptions, cash flow and whatever else you may come up with, you'll have an easier time integrating OData data sources into standard applications that are likely used to setup such a dashboard.

Answer 3

As of now, if you browse the API hub from SAP https://api.sap.com/package/SAPS4HANACloud?section=Artifacts for S/4 HANA Cloud, you will see SAP is going forward to the direction of OPEN protocol like oData and SOAP. And you can easily wrap your BAPI as oData Serivce or SOAP service.