Integration Technologies for SuccessFactors Employee Central

I will briefly explain what options does the EC provides in order to integrate to/from third party applications and which technology to use depending on the use case.

As you can see from the diagram below 3rd party applications can either use the Middleware in order to consume our existing prepackaged integration or call our API layer for custom integration.

How to create an Employee using OData APIs

In the API layer we provide the following options:

  1. File Import/Export: EC provides option to import all the person, employee data and foundation data including MDF using the import functionality in CSV format. You can automate the file export/import using job-scheduler and SFTP. This is the preferred option for initial data load or if you are not able to consume API (SOAP or OData).
  2. SFAPI: SFAPI stands for our SOAP based API. It supports CRUD operations i.e. it can be used to both read and write data. One special SOAP based API is compound employee API which returns all the employee data based on sophisticated filter in a single call. You can see what all the entities are supported for SOAP by looking at SFAPI data dictionary within Admin tools.
  3. OData API: EC provide a very sophisticated infrastructure for OData and is recommended medium of integration especially for direct consumption in an custom UI, for example: Extensions using HCP. Similar to SFAPI you can find list of supported entities (OData Data Dictionary) in admin tool.

OData or SOAP – Which API to use?

  • If you want to make use of RBP and concurrent user access to build own UIs on top of EC using an extension platform, OData is the technology of your choice.
  • If you want to access MDF Data, OData is the technology of choice.
  • For data replication using a technical user (read or read) both SOAP and OData can be used.

SOAP Compound Employee API

  • If you require for employee replication field level delta, snapshot information or you want to read information on modified employees only.
  • If you require to read data only (CE does not support write), you can find more details about CE API

You can find further info under: http://help.sap.com/hr_api/

Rating: 0 / 5 (0 votes)