Introduction
The SAP Business Connector (BC) is used in a large number of SAP production environments. SAP Business Connector will probably be gradually phased out and replaced by SAP XI technology. For the short term SAP Business connector and SAP XI will inevitably continue to coexist in companies IT landscapes.
This weblog presents the components and steps required to set-up a SAP XI <-> SAP BC integration scenario using HTTP protocol.
Use case
A company has selected SAP XI 3.0 as its application and business process integration platform.
The company has several processes running with SAP Business Connector. Considering the project scope, timeframe and resources the existing SAP Business Connector interfaces will be maintained and supported. Therefore new SAP XI interfaces and existing SAP Business Connector will coexist in the IT landscape.
The company is looking for a solution to integrate SAP XI and SAP Business Connector and decides to build a prototype based on HTTP protocol.
Components
The user will issue an HTTP request with a simple internet browser form. The request is processed by SAP XI and transmitted to SAP Business Connector. The SAP Business Connector processes the request and sends back a response to SAP XI. The response is displayed in the internet browser.
Configure the SAP BC
We have to set-up and activate the routing rule. In the example we will call the BC service recordToDocument.
Create the HTTP destination
We have to create an external HTTP connection to the Business Connector server. The communication channel will point to this external HTTP destination. We can use the transaction SM59:
Create XI objects
We create the following repository objects:
- Message_XML_Content
- Data_Type_XML
- Interface_Browser_Out (synchronous)
- Interface_Http_BC_In (synchronous)
We create the corresponding receiver determination, interface determination, receiver agreements:
The Prolog and Epilog fields allow formatting the HTTP request. In our case the XML document content is passed in the variable $xmlData.
For a more detailed description of the configuration steps and for code examples you can read the SDN article Integrating SAP Business Connector with SAP XI.
5 Comments
