Installation

Install the plugin

npm add cds-data-federation

The plugin auto-activates on load via cds-plugin.js — no manual wiring in your server.js or package.json.

AI assistants

Coming soon. Agent guidance and task skills for coding assistants will ship in a future release.

Peer dependencies

Package	Version	Required?
@sap/cds	>= 9	Yes — CDS 9 and CDS 10 are both supported
@sap-cloud-sdk/http-client	^4	Yes, for OData remote services
@sap-cloud-sdk/resilience	^4	Yes, for OData remote services
cds-caching	>= 1	Optional — cache.strategy: 'response' (default)
cds-data-pipeline	peer	Required for @federation.replicate and cache.strategy: 'entity'
@cap-js/sqlite	>= 2	Optional — SQLite target for replicate and entity cache (2.x on CDS 9, 3.x on CDS 10)

The SAP Cloud SDK HTTP client and resilience packages are what CAP uses under the hood for OData remote service calls. If you already have CAP connected to a remote OData service, these are already installed.

CDS 9 and CDS 10

The plugin runs on both major CAP runtimes. Version-specific behaviour (write-result shapes, queued-schedule lifecycle, HCQL auto-selection) is feature-detected at runtime — no configuration flag is required when you upgrade from CDS 9 to CDS 10.

Verifying the install

Boot your CAP app and look for a line like this in the log:

[cds-data-federation] discovered 3 @federation.* entities

That confirms the plugin is active and found annotations. From there, head to First Delegation.

Node.js version

The plugin requires Node.js 22 or newer (the CDS 10 minimum; CDS 9 also runs on Node 22+).

Project layout

The plugin makes no assumptions about your project layout. The only prerequisite is that your remote service is configured in cds.requires (e.g., via a package.json's cds.requires block or a service binding), following CAP's Reuse & Compose — Service Integration pattern.