How to connect SAP Cloud solutions quickly in SAP PI using the PI Connectivity Add-on.

Even though SAP CPI is the standard cloud integration tool offered by SAP for connecting cloud solutions like SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP now also offers an alternative for SAP PI on-premise customers with the standard Connectivity Add-on toolkit. This toolkit allows you to use the oData interface definitions in PI flow modeling.

The Connectivity Add-on can be downloaded and installed on SAP PI.

The Connectivity Add-on offers OData adapter metadata and ESR integration content which allows the CRUD operations towards SAP Cloud for Customer elegantly.

In our case, the integration and orchestration was aimed at SAP Cloud for Customer from SAP Commerce Cloud where it needed multiple lookup calls towards SAP Cloud for Customer to search for accounts and associated contacts and further proceed to a patch/post of a contact.

Once deployed, the solution consists of an Operation Mapping (OM), a Message Mapping UDF, an ICO Object and oData Channels.

To avoid the cumbersome performance of the ccBPM, com.sap.aii.mapping.lookup.LookupService class is leveraged to communicate with SAP Cloud for Customer via OData channels passed as parameters to the Operation mapping.