Data Model Creation and Maintenance

Developers create content that will be available for use through SAP Gateway on popular devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry. You can create content in two ways:

• Use the content generator to generate content quickly and automatically without having to write any code.

• Write your own code and create content manually.

Whichever method you use, a data model is created that you can view from transaction SE80 in the ABAP Workbench. To build your service, you then create a consumption model and add data models to it.

The data model you create contains the operations you want to perform at runtime, mapped to specified data and attributes. At runtime, this data model is exposed to SAP Gateway services that trigger the operations that you defined at design time; returning data and fields to the end user. For example, you can create a data model that reads customers’ names, addresses, and contact details for a sales manager to have available on his or her mobile phone.

The following diagram gives an overview of the data model creation process.

Figure 1: Data Model Creation

• Valid system alias to identify the remote system used as a data source.

  If you are using the content generator, the system alias used when creating a data model also needs to be configured in all systems to which the data model is being transported (it can point to different physical destinations, but it must have the same name). If this is not the case, you cannot open the data model from the content generator in those systems.

• If you are using the content generator, you must configure a managed RFC connection to the system to be used to retrieve information from the data source.