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SAP Netweaver Gateway Icon SAP Netweaver Gateway ODBC Driver

The SAP Netweaver Gateway ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from SAP Netweaver Gateway, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access SAP Netweaver Gateway data like you would a database - read, write, and update SAP Netweaver Gateway Entities, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze SAP Netweaver Gateway Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze SAP Netweaver Gateway data in Microsoft R Open.

Access SAP Netweaver Gateway data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for SAP Netweaver Gateway and the RODBC package to work with remote SAP Netweaver Gateway data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to SAP Netweaver Gateway data and visualize SAP Netweaver Gateway data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to SAP Netweaver Gateway as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to SAP Netweaver Gateway follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

SAP Gateway allows both basic and OAuth 2.0 authentication. You can use basic authentication to connect to your own account, or you can use OAuth to enable other users to retrieve data from your service with their accounts. In addition to authenticating, set the following connection properties to access SAP Gateway tables.

  • Url: Set this to the URL of your environment, or to the full URL of the service. For example, the full URL might appear as: https://sapes5.sapdevcenter.com/sap/opu/odata/IWBEP/GWSAMPLE_BASIC/. In this example, the environment URL would just be: https://sapes5.sapdevcenter.com.
  • Namespace: Set the appropriate Service Namespace. In the example above, IWBEP is the namespace. It is optional if the full URL to the service is specified.
  • Service: Set this to the service you want to retrieve data from. In the example above, the service is GWSAMPLE_BASIC. It is not required if the full URL is specified.

Authenticate via Basic Authentication

In basic authentication, you use your login credentials to connect. Set the following properties:

  • User: This is the username you use to log in to SAP Gateway.
  • Password: This is the password you use to log in to SAP Gateway.

Authenticate via OAuth Authentication

You can connect to SAP Gateway using the embedded OAuth connectivity (without setting any additional authentication connection properties). When you connect, the OAuth endpoint opens in your browser. Log in and grant permissions to complete the OAuth process. See the OAuth section in the online Help documentation for more information on other OAuth authentication flows.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for SAP Netweaver Gateway in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData SAPGateway Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for SAP Netweaver Gateway Description = My Description User = user Password = password URL = https://sapes5.sapdevcenter.com/sap/opu/odata/IWBEP/GWSAMPLE_BASIC/

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to SAP Netweaver Gateway Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SAPGateway Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models SAP Netweaver Gateway APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the SAP Netweaver Gateway API.

salesorderlineitems <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT ProductID, Quantity FROM SalesOrderLineItems WHERE Quantity < 15", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(salesorderlineitems)

Plot SAP Netweaver Gateway Data

You can now analyze SAP Netweaver Gateway data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(salesorderlineitems$Quantity, main="SAP Netweaver Gateway SalesOrderLineItems", names.arg = salesorderlineitems$ProductID, horiz=TRUE)