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I am working on a large project at work that requires me to create OData's for a large variety of Remote Function Calls. I was able to work out how to model and create OData's for simple RFCs; however, I am struggling with more complex RFCs that use multiple tables as well as simple exporting and importing parameters.

I want to output these tables as well as the importing and exporting parameters via GetEntity and GetEntitySet with just one call. I have done extensive searching online to find solutions but the best solution seems to be redefining the RFC's or calling the OData multiple times which is not ideal.

Is there any way to combine multiple tables with several entries in the output? When I say output, I am referring to the resulting XML from GetEntity/GetEntitySet.

For example, take the below fake RFC definition that takes a PERNR, and outputs a list of direct reports and a structure of employee details.

IMPORTING

  • PERNR

EXPORTING

  • S_EMPLOYEE_DETAILS

TABLES

  • T_DIRECT_REPORTS

Is there a way to combine the table, structure, and importing parameters into one output?

Sandra Rossi
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Keagan Lidwell
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1 Answers1

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The first thing to understand is that the OData protocol is not intended to solely work like classical function calls. It is based however on entity/relationship kind of model. So in your case id sugest to create an entity type named 'Employee' with the appropiate properties of your structure S_EMPLOYEE_DETAILS. With this you can e.g. implement the method GET_EMPLOYEE_ENTITY to retrieve a single instance of an employee via PERNR.

The next thing to do would be to get the direct reports of this employee. Since this is a relation 1:N from Employee to Employee in your case you can create a navigation property called 'DirectReports' with appropiate cardinality. Then in your GET_EMPLOYEE_ENTITYSET you can return the instances of table T_DIRECT_REPORTS (note that navigation property is not empty and you have to read the keys of the parent!).

Once you got this working you can move on to the 'best-practise' and implement the method GET_EXPANDED_ENTITY with filling the expand clauses, which is in my opinion the preferred way as you dont need to implement two seperate methods and is consiered faster as well (if many expands happen).

Both methods of implementation can be called via

GET EmployeeSet('12345678')?$expand=DirectReports

mash
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