"Check Connection" Button Got You Down? A few tips on destinations

I get messages from Builders ALL the time — just today on LinkedIn — saying they set up their destination and got an error when they clicked Check Connection.

The Check Connection button does NOT check everything about a destination, only that it is reachable. According to an SAP Note:

“The Check Connection does not guarantee that a backend is operational. It only verifies if a connection to the backend is possible from network perspective.”

Any code other than 500 is considered successful.

So, for example, if you set up a destination to the SAP Business Accelerator Hub, with the additional property of URL.headers.APIKey set your API key, you will get a 401. For some reason, the key is not sent in the header during this check.

But this is considered successful – notice the icon indicating the check was successful.

If your service has no authentication and no permission checks, it will succeed with 200 message.

If the service does require sign-in and the credentials are provided in the main area of the destination configuration (not in the additional properties), these will get sent and if set up correctly will also return 200.

Only if the server cannot be reached at all, like in this example where I misspelled the Northwind URL, will the check come back unsuccessful.

For more information on checking destinations, see the documentation (although this is from a Neo documentation set).

P.S.: 401 vs 403 — For debugging, it is important to know the difference between 401 and 403 error codes. 401, even though its message is “Unauthorized”, means that the user was not authenticated. 403 means the user was authenticated and their identity is known, but that they do not have permission to the resource. So when you get 401 for a connection to SAP Business Accelerator Hub, it is because your API key is not being sent — or not being sent in the correct way — and therefore the site does not know who you are.