WebSphere® Adapter for SAP Software provides
multiple ways to interact with applications and data on SAP Web application
servers. Outbound processing (from an application to the adapter to the SAP
server) and inbound processing (from the SAP server to the adapter to an endpoint)
are supported.
Overview of the outbound and inbound processing interfaces
You
have multiple ways to connect to applications and data on the SAP server.
WebSphere Adapter for SAP Software provides
three interfaces to the
SAP server for
outbound processing.
- Through its BAPI interface, the adapter issues remote function calls (RFC)
to RFC-enabled functions, such as a Business Application Programming Interface
(BAPI) function. These function calls create, update, or retrieve data on
an SAP server and
return the results to the calling application. You can work with individual
BAPIs, BAPI transactions (ordered sets of BAPIs), or BAPI result sets.
- The Query interface for SAP Software retrieves data from specific SAP
application tables. It can return the data or simply check for the existence
of the data.
- With the Application Link Enabling (ALE) interface, you exchange data
using SAP Intermediate Data structures (IDocs). For outbound processing, you
send an IDoc or a packet of IDocs to the SAP server.
The ALE interface, which is particularly useful for batch processing of IDocs,
provides asynchronous exchange. You can use the queued transactional
(qRFC) interface to send the IDocs to a queue on the SAP server to
ensure the order in which the IDocs are processed.
WebSphere Adapter for SAP Software provides
two interfaces to the
SAP server for
inbound processing.
- With the ALE inbound processing interface, the adapter listens for events
and receives one or more IDocs from the SAP server.
As with ALE outbound processing, ALE inbound processing provides asynchronous
exchange. You can use the qRFC interface to receive the IDocs from a queue
on the SAP server,
which ensures the order in which the IDocs are received. The event processing
is tracked in an event-recovery table.
You set up the adapter to perform outbound and inbound processing
by using the Adapter Connection wizard to
create a deployable module that includes the interface to the SAP application
as well as business objects based on the functions or tables it discovers
on the SAP server.
How the adapter interacts with the SAP server
The adapter uses the SAP Java™ Connector (SAP JCo) API to communicate
with SAP applications, as shown in the following example of a BAPI outbound
call. The client application sends a request to the adapter, which uses the
SAP JCo API to translate the request into a BAPI function call. When the results
are received, the adapter sends the response to the client.
The adapter can accept requests from the client in a variety
of formats.