Type-Safe Client for SAP Business Rules service

Warning

The Business Rules Client btp-business-rules has been deprecated. We are planning to discontinue support of this module with SAP Cloud SDK v5 by end of 2023.

Alternatively, you can generate the APIs by using the OpenAPI generator with the YAML specification of the service.

Overview

The SAP Business Rules service for Cloud Foundry helps customers to translate complex business logic into a natural language. It consists of multiple APIs that can be used for modelling, authoring, and simulating business rules.

To benefit from features offered by the REST APIs of the SAP BTP Business Rules service, you can leverage the type-safe client library provided by the SAP Cloud SDK and discover it via your IDE.

Prerequisites

Add the latest version of the SAP Cloud SDK to your Java application dependencies or generate a new one from archetypes that we provide.

After you created an SAP Cloud SDK-based Java app, you can invoke the SAP BTP Business Rules REST API in your business logic. More precisely, the SAP Cloud SDK offers abstractions for the Rule Authoring API and the Rule Execution API. Both of them can be accessed conveniently once the initial configuration is completed.

Cloud Foundry Configuration

Let's look in detail at all necessary steps to configure your Cloud Foundry app to use the SAP BTP Business Rules service.

Bind App to SAP Business Technology Platform Business Rules Service Instance

Refer to the documentation on help.sap.com for the full picture. We'll outline the essentials with the assumption that you understand or have all the following:

• Which Cloud Foundry subaccount and space you want to use
• You have access to the SAP BTP Business Rules Service feature
• You have installed the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (CLI) on your machine.

Create Service Instance

Open the command line and authenticate at your Cloud Foundry organization by invoking cf login.

Consider specifying the respective subaccount, organization, and space with cf target if necessary.

Use cd to navigate to the directory of your app and run the following to create the service instance:

cf create-service business-rules lite my-business-rules

This command creates an instance of the SAP BTP Business Rules Service in the CF space that your CLI points to. Note that we named the service instance my-business-rules. If you have chosen a different name, please, remember the name as you'll need it for your deployment descriptor manifest.yml later on.

Once the service instance creation is finished, you can see the service instance in your CF space under Services\Instances in the left-hand side menu.

Bind your App to Service Instance

Open the file manifest.yml in your project and mention your service instance under services as follows:

applications:
  - name: awesome-app
    memory: 1024M
    timeout: 600
    random-route: false
    path: application/target/awesome-app-application.war
    buildpacks:
      - sap_java_buildpack
    env:
      TARGET_RUNTIME: tomee7
      SET_LOGGING_LEVEL: '{ROOT: INFO, com.sap.cloud.sdk: INFO}'
      JBP_CONFIG_SAPJVM_MEMORY_SIZES: metaspace:128m..
    services:
      - my-destination
      - my-business-rules
    routes:
      - route: <omitted-on-purpose>

This ensures that the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable of the CF application gets enhanced with an additional entry containing the connection details of the newly bound SAP BTP Business Rules service. Now, redeploy your app with cf push.

Develop Your App

Dependency Assumptions

This guide assumes that you have a Java project using the SAP Cloud SDK. If not, we recommend going ahead and creating one from one of the Maven archetypes. You should also have Apache Maven installed and be able to successfully run mvn clean install from the root of your project.

Make sure that you have the SAP Cloud SDK Bill-of-Material (BOM) in your dependencyManagement section of your pom.xml structure like in the example below.

Always use the latest version of SAP Cloud SDK

Current version is:

pom.xml

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.sap.cloud.sdk</groupId>
      <artifactId>sdk-bom</artifactId>
      <version>4.XX.X</version>
      <type>pom</type>
      <scope>import</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

Add SAP BTP Business Rules Service Dependency To Your Project

You can refer to the Java client library for the SAP BTP Business Rules service with the following Maven dependency:

pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.sap.cloud.sdk.services</groupId>
    <artifactId>btp-business-rules</artifactId>
</dependency>

After adding the dependency to your pom.xml file, run mvn clean install to let Maven install it.

Invoke the Java Client Library

Create Destination

Deprecated API

The APIs mentioned below are deprecated and will be removed in version 5 of the SAP Cloud SDK, which is scheduled to be released in Q4 2023.

Let's create a Java representation of this destination. You can use ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.getDestinationForService to create a destination by reading properties from the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable entry for the Business Rules service:

// get destination for Rule Authoring API
final HttpDestination ruleAuthoringDestination =
                ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.getDestinationForService(
                        ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.CfServices.BUSINESS_RULES_AUTHORING,
                        "my-business-rules");

// get destination for Rule Execution API
final HttpDestination ruleExecutionDestination =
                ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.getDestinationForService(
                        ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.CfServices.BUSINESS_RULES_EXECUTION,
                        "my-business-rules");

caution

The ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.getDestinationForService API currently only works out of the box for a handful of services. For other services, the alternative would be to create a Destination manually in CF using values in the VCAP_SERVICES and then accessing the destination using the DestinationAccessor. For details refer to Additional information section.

Invoke the APIs

Once you created a destination that points to the API of your choice, you can make the first call to that API.

For example, you can list all existing projects from the Rule Authoring API:

final List<ProjectVersionObject> allProjects =
                new ProjectsApi(authoringDestination).readProjects();

This is how we call the APIs of the SAP BTP Business Rules service in a type-safe manner and benefit from type-safe access to the resulting response objects. For instance, we can read particular details about each project definition:

allProjects.forEach(project -> {
    log.info(project.getId());
    log.info(project.getName());
    log.info(project.getVersion().toString());
});

You can check the SAP BTP Business Rules API's model definition on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub or use your IDE to discover available properties via its auto-complete function.

Capabilities and Limitations

Capabilities and Benefits

The Java client library for SAP BTP Business Rules service enables the developer to:

• Invoke the REST API in a type-safe and convenient manner
• Provides Java abstractions for the Rule Authoring and the Rule Execution REST API endpoints along with the respective model classes
• Relieves the developer from all the HTTP-related development work like interpreting status codes, JSON de-/serialization, etc
• It lets the developer focus on the business logic instead of coding low-level API calls
• We keep the library up to date with the latest API specifications which simplifies the maintainability of your app's code
• We integrate the SAP BTP Business Rules library with SAP Cloud SDK capabilities, such as tenant-aware destination retrieval and many more

Known Limitations

• We support SAP BTP Business Rules service APIs only on the SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment. The SAP Business Technology Platform Neo environment is Not supported!

Additional Information

info

Please note the steps outlined in the below section are only required if you chose to skip using the convenience API ScpCfServiceDestinationLoader.getDestinationForService introduced here and instead would like to use DestinationAccessor. This could be case, for example, if you are interested in trying to use generated clients of other services.

Creating HTTP Destinations Manually

To create HTTP destinations manually in CF from the values read from VCAP_SERVICES of the CF application, please follow the below steps. The steps below can be continued in this example from the Bind your App to Service Instance section.

Take Note of API endpoint and OAuth Credentials

Once the app is bound to the Business Rules service instance and app deployment has finished, go to your CF space and navigate to Services\Instances. You should see the service instance you created along with the information that is bound to your application.

Click on the service instance name, for example my-business-rules. On the right-hand side, you can see all apps that are bound to that service instance along with a button View Credentials. Make sure that the entry that belongs to your app is selected in the table below, given that multiple apps are bound to the same service instance, and click the View Credentials button.

Consider the JSON content in the new pop-up window. Here is a quick example:

{
  "endpoints": {
    "rule_repository_url": "foo",
    "rule_runtime_url": "bar"
  },
  "html5-apps-repo": {
    "app_host_id": "foo"
  },
  "uaa": {
    "uaadomain": "bar",
    "tenantmode": "dedicated",
    "sburl": "bar",
    "clientid": "foo",
    "verificationkey": "bar",
    "apiurl": "foo",
    "xsappname": "bar",
    "identityzone": "foo",
    "identityzoneid": "bar",
    "clientsecret": "foo",
    "tenantid": "bar",
    "url": "foo"
  },
  "sap.cloud.service": "com.sap.bpm.rule"
}

Next, look at the JSON content and collect the values for the following JSON keys:

• rule_repository_url (this one is needed if you want to use the Rule Authoring API)
• rule_runtime_url (this one is needed if you want to use the Rule Execution API)
• uaa\url
• uaa\clientid
• uaa\clientsecret

You'll need these values in the next step.

Create HTTP Destination

Go to your CF subaccount, navigate to Connectivity\Destinations in the left-hand side menu, and create a new HTTP destination with the following properties:

• Name: Business-Rules-Authoring-Api
• Type: HTTP
• URL: The value of rule_repository_url
• Proxy Type: Internet
• Authentication: OAuth2ClientCredentials
• Client ID: The value of clientid
• Client Secret: The value of clientsecret
• Token Service URL: The value of url appended by /oauth/token?grant_type=client_credentials

Rule Execution Destination

The above example shows how to configure the destination for the Rule Authoring API. You can configure the destination to point to the Rule Execution API by adapting the Name, the URL, and the Token Service URL fields accordingly.

Click Save. Restart your app by navigating to Spaces\<you-space-name>\Applications. Chose your app from the list by clicking on the link with its name and find the restart button on the page that loads.

Create Destination Programmatically

The invocation of the Business Rules client remains the same, the only difference in code is while trying to fetch the destination. The name of the HTTP destination that we configured in the SAP BTP cockpit is Business-Rules-Authoring-Api. Let's create a Java representation of this destination.

final String destinationName = "Business-Rules-Authoring-Api";
final HttpDestination ruleAuthoringDestination = DestinationAccessor.getDestination(destinationName).asHttp();

That's it, the invocation to the java client library would remain the same and no more changes are required.