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I am currently involved in defining strategy for a large future project, where it is proposed to developed native mobile phone applications that would integrate with SAP middleware.

I would like to understand how one would develop a native iOS mobile app that would communicate with SAP NetWeaver, using OData?

Regards.

Sandra Rossi
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Flash Jack From Gundagai
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2 Answers2

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You can create server side OData service and communicate with it from mobile app by http/https protocol. OData supports both JSON and XML formats.

If your application is rather simple - common BSP application can be used. It works faster but a little bit harder to develop complex application.

Walking.In.The.Air
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  • Hello, thank you for your comment, it is very much appreciated... one issue that has come up for the organisation that I am working with is this SAP OData direction seems to be somewhat new, and in a way, "the next big thing"... at present some of our senior stakeholders are using JCO connectors for communications between SAP WCEM, and SAP CRM, because it performed better than OData, or even RFC... has SAP provided any technical reasons why the recommendations of OData over JCO, or even RFC? – Flash Jack From Gundagai Oct 08 '15 at 21:44
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Odata is an open standard, there are libraries that you could use in your ios project hence you could consume the Odata service in your app. It is just another HTTP/HTTPS request-response.

  1. SAP gateway expose Odata service
  2. Consume that in the app using open source libraries available.

Another option: Use SAP mobile platform 3 (a product from SAP to mobilise enterprise) to develop native and hybrid apps. It supports all major mobile platforms like iOS, windows and android. It has an SDK which provides all enterprise level features to your app - offline support, SSO, different authentication mechanisms like LDAP and 509 certificate etc. SAP also provides cloud based solution as well it is called Hana cloud platform mobile services.

Midhun VP
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  • Thanks for your response @MidhunVP, but I have two questions.. a. I think the suggestion about the SMP is an excellent one, but the CIO is against it, because it was originally Sybase... not sure why?? b. It has been previously recommended by SAP to use JCO, but I am not famillar with it, what are the benefits of JCO over OData? Best Regards. – Flash Jack From Gundagai Oct 11 '15 at 06:27
  • SAP JCO is a proprietary solution from SAP. If your requirement is to develop mobile apps without a platform like SMP the best option is to go with Odata. Because Odata is an open standard, you will find a lot of documentation in the internet itself. The Fiori apps are developed with this approach. I am not sure why you are not interested with SMP 3 or HCPms- it provides all the libraries you want. It has in built in features that makes the development of apps easy. SMP SDK and HCPms trial are available. – Midhun VP Oct 12 '15 at 14:13