Connecting to S/4
The engine speaks OData to your S/4 system. How it gets there depends on where that system lives, and both shapes are ordinary SAP connectivity rather than anything we invented.
On this page
Two deployment shapes#
- On-premise S/4 — reached through SAP Cloud Connector, exposing the OData services you choose to your BTP subaccount. The engine calls the Cloud Connector destination like any other BTP application.
- S/4HANA Cloud — reached through a Communication Arrangement, using a communication user scoped to the communication scenarios covering the services you want.
The engine does not care which. It is the same OData either way, and the difference is a connection setting rather than a different product or a different licence.
Which services to expose#
Expose only what you intend to use. The engine discovers what is available rather than assuming a fixed list, so adding a service later is a change on your side and needs no release from us.
Our curated mappings cover the objects field service touches most. If you are deciding what to activate, this is a reasonable starting list:
- Billing document (invoice) snapshot
- Business partner snapshot
- Equipment warranty
- Equipment snapshot
- Maintenance Order snapshot
- Material document (goods movement)
- Material stock (live)
- Measuring Point snapshot
- Notification snapshot
- Sales quotation snapshot
- Service Contract snapshot
- Service Order snapshot
- Service Quotation snapshot
Which of these you need depends on what you bought — the Warranty Checker wants equipment and service contracts, the Stock Checker wants material stock and movements. Each product guide names its own.
Certificates#
On start-up the engine probes your S/4 host and reports what it found. A verified certificate stays verified. A private certificate authority or a self-signed test system is recognised and handled, and the engine says which case it is in — so an unusual certificate is a known state at boot rather than a mystery failure at the first request.
Checking a connection#
Once the engine is up, its discovery endpoints report what your system actually exposes: services, entity sets, fields and value helps. That is the fastest way to confirm a connection end to end — if discovery lists your services, the path works.
The same information drives the designer: when someone builds a screen the field lists come from your system rather than from a fixed catalogue we shipped.
What to do when a service is missing#
Products degrade honestly rather than showing an empty table. The Stock Checker, for instance, says explicitly when the material stock service is not activated on the tenant — because an empty table would read as “no stock”, which is a different and far more expensive statement.
If a product reports a missing service, the fix is on the S/4 side: activate it, expose it through the same connection, and the product picks it up with no change from us.