OData Server Architecture

The SAP Sybase OData Server consists of the OData Producer and an HTTP server.

The OData Server consists of:

OData Producer – a Java servlet that uses the JDBC API to connect to an SAP ASE. The OData Producer processes OData requests and responses, and interfaces with the database. The OData Producer maps OData concepts to relational database concepts in this way:

OData Concept Database Equivalent

Entity type Table or view

Entity type instance Row

Key Primary key

Link Foreign key

Property Column
An HTTP server that handles OData requests from Web clients – the OData server uses the Jetty WebServer as its HTTP server. This embedded HTTP server also acts as a Java servlet container, which is required to host the OData Producer.

Instead of using the embedded HTTP server, you can use your own HTTP server to handle OData requests, as long as your solution can also host Java servlets. For example, you can set up an IIS or Apache server to forward requests to a Tomcat server.

OData client requests are sent to an HTTP server through URIs, and are processed by the OData Producer, which then interfaces with the database server to issue database requests and retrieve content for the OData responses.

OData Concept	Database Equivalent
Entity type	Table or view
Entity type instance	Row
Key	Primary key
Link	Foreign key
Property	Column

The OData schema for each client is based on the client's database connection permissions. Clients cannot view or modify database objects for which they do not have view permission.

You can grant client access to the database using a preconfigured connection string or basic HTTP authentication.