Metadata publishing
Describing a service to something other than a human — service metadata for clients, and machine-readable descriptions for registries and discovery.
Overview
Node.js →
@cap-js/asyncapi Exports AsyncAPI documents describing the events a CAP service emits and consumes.
@sap/cds Emits EDMX and CSN for every exposed service, generated from the model rather than maintained separately.
Java →
com.sap.cds:cds-feature-ord Generates Open Resource Discovery (ORD) documents from a CAP Java application's model, a single entry point that a static metadata catalog or a runtime landscape inspection can read.
Not covered: It stops at protocol metadata. Broader ecosystem description — Open Resource Discovery, API registries — is a plugin.
Built into @sap/cds
Artifacts
Content
Group by11 of 11 pieces
Piece, what it offers
September 15th: What's New on developers.sap.comSeptember 15th: What's New on developers.sap.comThomas Jung walks through a week of changes aimed at agentic consumption of developers.sap.com itself: the hosted MCP server gains a published .well-known/mcp.json manifest, curated tools (search_tutorials, get_tutorial_step with a Markdown format option, search_channels), and a listing in the ORD catalog beside its OData, REST and GraphQL APIs. It also documents the site's existing A2A endpoint for the first time and ships a way to turn a tutorial into an installable, cryptographically signed AI Skill with a generated verification script, both concrete instances of agent tooling; separately, five broken GraphQL example queries were fixed and the full SDL is now served, and new sitemap.md, llms.txt fixes and ORD entries round out the site's own metadata publishing.published 2026-09-15
How to rename an OData V4 service?How to rename an OData V4 service?Renaming an OData V4 service binding changes its Service Alias and the resulting service URL, breaking any app already deployed against the old one — shown on a /DMO/TRAVEL-based example in the SAP BTP ABAP environment by unpublishing, renaming and republishing the binding, then reading the new URL back from the OData V4 service catalog's ServiceGroups entry. It weighs that against two alternatives: adding a second service definition and publishing it as a new service version under the same binding, or creating an entirely new service definition and binding, which keeps the original URL live during the cutover.published 2026-07-04
SAP ORD Made Simple: What It Does and Why It’s Crucial in your SAP Landscape + Purpose and ValueSAP ORD Made Simple: What It Does and Why It’s Crucial in your SAP Landscape + Purpose and ValueExplains Open Resource Discovery (ORD), the metadata protocol SAP services use to self-describe their APIs, events and entity types for discovery across SAP Integration Suite, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Datasphere. Points to SAP's @cap-js/ord as the reference implementation that lets CAP applications publish ORD-compliant metadata, the piece metadata publishing marks as beyond the EDMX and CSN the core emits on its own. Shows how to confirm ORD support for a published API by checking its ORD ID on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.Yogananda, published 2026-03-01
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Where ORD Is Used in SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Data Cloud & SAP DatabricksWhere ORD Is Used in SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Data Cloud & SAP DatabricksOpen Resource Discovery (ORD) is the metadata standard SAP's Business Accelerator Hub attaches to APIs, and the one SAP Business Data Cloud requires of any data product — including ones Databricks publishes — before SAP Datasphere can discover it. Data products moving from Databricks into Business Data Cloud carry both ORD and CSN metadata side by side.Yogananda, published 2026-03-01
How to use reserved words as property names in your OData service?How to use reserved words as property names in your OData service?Setting a CDS view alias to a reserved OData word, such as Number, fails compilation with 'NUMBER is a reserved word'. The fix for a RAP-based OData service is the @odata.property.name annotation: it lets the underlying CDS view keep a compiler-safe name (NumberInStock) while the $metadata EntityType still exposes the field as Number, shown against a products view and its generated EDMX.Andre_Fischer, published 2025-11-10
CAP, CDS, CDL, CSN and jq - finding associationsCAP, CDS, CDL, CSN and jq - finding associationsHow associations are actually represented once CDL is compiled into CSN, worked out by parsing the machine-readable form with jq. Useful less as a recipe than as a way in: anything that wants to reason about a CDS model without the compiler has to read CSN, and this is what that looks like from the outside.published 2024-04-16
Importing an external data model using CDS Graphical Modeler for Visual Studio CodeImporting an external data model using CDS Graphical Modeler for Visual Studio CodeWalks through the CDS Graphical Modeler for Visual Studio Code: creating a "Customers" entity, importing an external OData model from an edmx file into the CDS model, and drawing a managed association from the new entity to an entity from the imported namespace. The import happens through the modeler's GUI rather than the cds import command, and the imported edmx becomes a CDS file the modeler can open directly.Xiao-fei_Song, published 2022-05-09
Importing external edmx files to your CAP project using the CDS Graphical ModelerImporting external edmx files to your CAP project using the CDS Graphical ModelerAn EDMX downloaded from the API hub — API_BUSINESS_PARTNER in the example — imported into the CDS model and its entities exposed as projections, done through the graphical modeller rather than cds import. Barely a page long.Xiao-fei_Song, published 2021-05-19
SAP Cloud Platform Backend service: Tutorial [12]: CDS : local: buildSAP Cloud Platform Backend service: Tutorial [12]: CDS : local: buildCompiling a CDS model locally with the cds command-line tool, installed from @sap/cds via SAP's own npm registry, before uploading it to SAP Cloud Platform Backend service: cds compile converts the model to CSN by default, --to edmx or --to edm produces the OData V2 or V4 metadata document, and --to hana or --to sql produces the database-specific definition files. It shows the local build catching an error the CDS editor's own validation misses — an entity with no key, valid CSN but invalid OData — before the same model reaches the server's compiler.CarlosRoggan, published 2019-04-15
Develop a full stack Business application with SAP Cloud Application Programming ModelDevelop a full stack Business application with SAP Cloud Application Programming ModelBuilds a full-stack CAP application in SAP Web IDE Full Stack's now-retired 'SAP Cloud Platform Business Application' template: a data-model.cds entity with its own service definition, then Fiori annotations on the generated OData. Building the project compiles that model into Catalog.xml and csn.json, the EDMX and CSN that metadata publishing says every exposed service gets. The entity and service definitions it writes by hand are the basic shape data modelling covers, though the webIDE and MTA tooling staged around them is gone.former_member584731, published 2018-11-29
Introducing the Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP)Introducing the Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP)SAP's own general-availability announcement for CAP, laid out as a Golden Path: a data model and service defined in CDS gets a generated service provider that serves metadata publishing and CRUD requests, fills in primary keys and audit data, and writes trace and audit logs without application code. The same CDS model carries annotations that translate to OData vocabularies and generate a Fiori elements app skeleton, which is how Fiori annotations work in CAP.Daniel7, published 2018-06-05
SAP ORD Made Simple: What It Does and Why It’s Crucial in your SAP Landscape + Purpose and ValueSAP ORD Made Simple: What It Does and Why It’s Crucial in your SAP Landscape + Purpose and ValueExplains Open Resource Discovery (ORD), the metadata protocol SAP services use to self-describe their APIs, events and entity types for discovery across SAP Integration Suite, SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Datasphere. Points to SAP's @cap-js/ord as the reference implementation that lets CAP applications publish ORD-compliant metadata, the piece metadata publishing marks as beyond the EDMX and CSN the core emits on its own. Shows how to confirm ORD support for a published API by checking its ORD ID on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.Yogananda, published 2026-03-01
Details
Coverage
For your agent
- Ref
capability:metadata-publishing- JSON
- /capabilities/metadata-publishing.json
- MCP
- Connecting an agent