SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

2613670 - What are the available APIs for SuccessFactors?

Symptom

Basic information for the available APIs for SuccessFactors and the documentation regarding them.

Environment

SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite.- APIs

Resolution

SuccessFactors has different APIs available, OData and SFAPI.

From the documentation:

SFAPI:

The SFAPI is SuccessFactors Data API. It is a SOAP Web Service designed for importing and exporting data to and from your SuccessFactors instance. It provides generic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations to access data, as well as meta-data operations to allow runtime discovery of the data. Data are exposed as entities called SFObjects, which are conceptually analogous to database tables. Using the meta-data operations, you can list the SFObjects available to the API, and describe the fields in these entities. Using the CRUD operations you can query or edit the data.

OData API:


The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a standardized protocol for creating and consuming data APIs. OData builds on core protocols like HTTP, and commonly accepted methodologies like REST. The result is a uniform way to expose full-featured data APIs. OData provides both a standard for how to represent your data and a metadata method to describe the structure of your data, and the operations available in your API. SuccessFactors OData API service is based on OData V2.0. The HCM Suite OData API is SuccessFactors Web Services API based on OData protocol intended to enable access to data in the SuccessFactors system. The API is data oriented. This API provides methods for CRUD style access (Create, Read, Update and Delete). The API is best used for frequent or real time requests for small amounts of data. Large data requests are better handled by batch FTP processes. This OData API is used to configure entities. Each SuccessFactors module can be accessed using its own set of entities.

Detailed information can be found in the guides:

The recommendation is to use OData unless there's a limitation regarding protocols from the customer side or CompoundEmployee is used for replication, for example.

See Also

Integration Center: Enables HR business analysts to build, run, schedule, and monitor simple integrations. It simplifies the most common export and import use cases. You can build integrations quickly and easily through a guided workflow. For full details please refer to the Integration Center Guide at link.

Keywords

SuccessFactors API, OData API, SFAPI , KBA , LOD-SF-INT , Integrations , LOD-SF-INT-ODATA , OData API Framework , LOD-SF-INT-API , API & Adhoc API Framework , How To

Product

SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite all versions