Modify the URL Path Function for Your ShortPoint REST API Connection

If you tried to use the REST API connection type before, you may have noticed that it allows you to input a REST API URL or one will be selected if you select a local data source. This article sets out to explain how you can use the Modify URL path function to dynamically edit, add or remove directories in the URL path of your connection.

Issue

Let's say that you want to do dynamic manipulation of the URL path of the REST API connection and either add, remove or edit directories. If you have selected a local data source, the connection URL will not be editable, while if you have selected a REST API connection, you will be able to edit the full length of the URL, but perhaps you would like to modify or add new path directories based on dynamic data.

The URL path is represented by the value beginning after the top level domain (TLD) name, which in our case would be:

/sap/fiori/shortpointwidgetbeta/destinations/shortpoint-sharepoint_announcements/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Announcements')/Items

And you would like an extra directory to be prepended to the URL, for example:

/root

Since the URL is not directly editable, this functionality will allow you to use custom JavaScript code in order to extract the current path as a JavaScript string, manipulate it and reattach it to the URL before connecting.

Solution

We need to process the URL path so that the final URL path includes the directory or directories we need, in our case:

/root/sap/fiori/shortpointwidgetbeta/destinations/shortpoint-sharepoint_announcements/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Announcements')/Items?$select=Id,Title,Body

This is where the Change Path Function in the Connect Tab comes in.

So what does this function do?

Before connecting to the REST API service, this function will be executed, allowing you to process the URL path string by adding, modifying or removing directories, or just performing JavaScript string manipulation methods on the string.

This function has only one argument (path), which is the path extracted from the URL as a string. If you type nothing in the Change Path Function, it will simply extract the existing URL path and perform no manipulation on it, the default value of this function being:

return path;

In the example provided above, the value of the path argument would be: 

/sap/fiori/shortpointwidgetbeta/destinations/shortpoint-sharepoint_announcements/_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Announcements')/Items

Since this argument is a string, we can perform string manipulation methods on it. In the simplest scenario possible, we would just need to concatenate the following:

/root

to the beginning of the string. That means we need to apply the following JavaScript code:

path = '/root' + path;
return path;

The updated URL path will be displayed at the top of the Change Path function once you click on Connect button:

That's it, the new URL path has been added to your original URL, replacing the old one, so you now have more control when it comes to sourcing your data.

Hope that helps,

Happy connecting!