OData Applications

OData applications are simple, mostly online mobile business applications that leverage standards-based approaches—OData protocol and RESTful Web Services. This approach provides instant quick value applications meant for end user productivity.

OData applications are developed to leverage a proxy connection to SAP EIS systems, such as SAP Business Suite, and are deployed using the Online Data Proxy runtime option, essentially making realtime SAP data available to device users. The proxy connection uses the RESTful OData protocol to connect through SAP Mobile Server and SAP NetWeaver Gateway to SAP enterprise information systems. Data is made available using a request-response pattern, without synchronization.

The proxy connection uses OData with SAP additions:

OData is the Microsoft-owned open protocol —a resource-based web protocol for querying and updating data. It defines operations on resources using HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE) and identifies those resources using a standard URI syntax. Data is transferred over HTTP using the Atom or JSON format.
OData for SAP Products provides SAP Extensions to the OData protocol that enable users to build user interfaces for accessing the data published via OData. This allows interfaces to define human-readable, language-dependent labels for all properties and free-text search within and across collections of similar entities (OpenSearch).

OData applications running on mobile devices use semantic annotations to tell the client which of the OData properties contain specific data, such as a phone number, a part of a name or address, or something related to a calendar event. This allows seamless integration with contacts, calendar, and telephony on the mobile device. A metadata document defines whether an entity set is searchable, which properties may be used in filter expressions, and which properties of an entity will always be managed by the server.

These applications:

Connect mobile devices more directly to SAP business systems, essentially making OData applications online. Data is not persisted, but can be cached.
Use SAP data and business process models
Leverage subscription and push notification features
Implement SAP single sign-on (SSO)
Ensure secure and reliable transport of data.