Resources — SAP Successfactors Odata and SFAPI API-How to work with them

Lecture : “OData Basics : Entity Metadata Document - comparison with other documents”

The article is supposed to serve as the resource for the lecture titled “OData Basics : Entity Metadata Document-comparison with other documents” in the course SAP Successfactors Odata and SFAPI API-How to work with them.

In this lecture we discussed over the Entity Metadata document and the information it contains , also we did a comparison study between the 3 documents (Service Document , Service Metadata Document, Entity Metadata Document) over the information these docs hold.

Entity Metadata Document

Entity Metadata Document: The Entity Metadata Document exposes metadata about the entity , which is much more detailed than the Service Metadata document. It can be navigated to via the URI:

https://apisalesdemo4.successfactors.com/odata/v2/Entity('User')?$format=json

Here, Successfactors have exposed Metadata as an entity and hence can be queried as shown below:

https://apisalesdemo4.successfactors.com/odata/v2/Entity('EmpJob')?$format=json&$select=effectiveDated,upsertable,path,properties

There are quite a few differences in the information that is exposed via the Entity Metadata document vs. Service Document vs. Service Metadata Document as discussed in the lecture, some of those are shown in the screenshot below:

Please note :

1. “apisalesdemo4.successfactors.com” is the Data Center URL for the respective SAP Successfactors instance; how to deduce this URL for the specific Successfactors Company URL is as explained in the earlier lectures.