Beginner
Testing API Business Hub APIs with Curl
June 5, 2020
Created by Meredith Hassett
January 12, 2017
20 min.
Try out an SAP API locally on your machine.
You will learn
You have already discovered what the API Business Hub is and learned how to test it on the website. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use command line tools like Curl and jq to test REST APIs locally on your machine.
Step 1: Navigate to the User Management API
Step 2: Generate sample API call code
In the tab API References, find the GET /User method. The SAP API Business Hub provides you with some starter code in a variety of languages and tools for each API. Click the Generate Code link at the top of the method definition.
A pop-up window will appear. The API call starter code is available in a couple different languages like JavaScript and Swift. You will be using the Curl code in the this example.
Select Curl and then copy the highlighted text in the clipboard. This personalized snippet already includes your unique API key.
Step 3: Run sample API call code
Paste the content of the clipboard in a terminal or command line window.
Hit Enter to run the command. It may take a few seconds before data is seen on your screen. If this is successful, it will return a data set of about 650 users.
You can use
CTRL+Cto stop the command from running.
You’ll notice that the output is not formatted. For this, you can pipe the output of Curl to jq to format it nicely.
Step 4: Limit the number of results
Do you remember the parameters you set when testing in the API Business Hub? Try adding in the $top parameter here. It’s a good thing to note that $ is not allowed in a URL and can be encoded with %24. This changes the second line of the command to.
--url https://sandbox.api.sap.com/successfactors/odata/v2/User?%24top=3 \
After your command line prints out 3 results, it should stop running.
If you get a Curl: no match error, try wrapping your URL in single quotes.
It may be easier to make edits to your Curl code in the text editor rather than directly in the command line.
Step 5: Add multiple parameters to the API call
Besides the $top parameter, you can add multiple parameters to the Query String of your API call.
Now add in the 2nd parameter for $select. You only want the firstName, lastName, and jobTitle for the top 3 users. You can delaminate values in the select array using a comma(,). However, a comma is not a character allowed in a URL. The ASCII encoded value is %2C.
This changes the second line of the command to.
--url 'https://sandbox.api.sap.com/successfactors/odata/v2/User?%24top=3&%24select=firstName%2ClastName%2CjobTitle' \
The
&character indicates to the command line that a new command in coming. You need the command line to interpret the&as part of the URL. To do so, you need to add single quotes(’) around the URL.
Run the assembled command in the terminal.
Copy the entire result set and paste the result in the text box below.
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