B2C With Strict Firewall Rules: Mission Possible

Last weekend I took part in a so called “Solution Jam” (and was a co-winner, tied with Roel van den Berge with his impressive ABAP Social Media Listener) at the SAP Inside Track Hamburg.

Kudos for the well-organized event to Renald Wittwer and Peter Langner !

In this SolJam I’ve presented a possible solution on how to manage a B2C scenario if your company/customer has strict firewall rules. Because of the lack of time, we only had 8 minutes for our demos, I couldn’t show the technical details. With this blog post I want to catch up.

Disclaimer

This is just a thought model on how to solve this problem. Don’t use this in a productive environment without further investigations especially in security and sizing!

The scenario

Regular B2B setup

I don’t think further explanations to this scenario are necessary.

B2B setup with strict firewall rules

But what if your company/customer has strict firewall rules where you cannot access your intranet systems from inside your DMZ? This is not very unusual, for good reasons, but the discussion about this topic should not be not part of this blog post.

One possible solution could be to store the Idocs inside the DMZ filesystem, the ERP system pulls and processes these files later. Some years ago I realized such kind of scenario with the use of SAP Business Connector.

B2C setup with strict firewall rules

So far, so good. Buuut, you cannot use files with a B2C connection, where you may have 100s or 1000s of parallel accesses. You need something like a cache database.

Technical details for the demo

In my demo I’ve used Mongo DB as cache DB with a Python-HTTP-Interface on top of it and Xampp as HTTP-Server.

Test setup:

In the DMZ you install Mongo DB, Sleepy Mongoose (the http interface) and your preferred http server.

On ERP side you need

• the ABAP JSON document class (https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/groups/zjson)
• MoDBap, the ABAP Mongo DB interface (https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/groups/modbap)

For installation and usage instructions please take a look into the corresponding SAP Code Exchange wikis.

Publishing the catalog data

First of all we want to publish some catalog data from the ERP system into the Mongo DB. As example we use data from the SDEMO package (also available in the NW 7.02 Test system).

TYPES: BEGIN OF ts_product

     ,   product_id   TYPE sdemo_product_id

     ,   category_id  TYPE sdemo_category_id

     ,   name         TYPE sdemo_prd_name

     ,   price        TYPE sdemo_price

     ,   web_address  TYPE sdemo_web_address

     ,   text         TYPE char255

     , END OF ts_product

     .

DATA: products TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF ts_product.

FIELD-SYMBOLS: <product> TYPE ts_product.

DATA: connection TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_connection,

      db         TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_db,

      collection TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_collection.

*——————————————————————–*

SELECT sdemo_pd~product_id

       sdemo_pd~category_id

       sdemo_pd_na~name

       sdemo_pd_pr~price

       sdemo_pd_wr~web_address

       sdemo_text~text

  INTO TABLE products

  FROM sdemo_pd

  INNER JOIN sdemo_pd_na

  ON  sdemo_pd_na~name_guid = sdemo_pd~name_guid

  AND sdemo_pd_na~langu     = ‘E’

  INNER JOIN sdemo_pd_pr

  ON  sdemo_pd_pr~product_guid = sdemo_pd~product_guid

  INNER JOIN sdemo_pd_wr

  ON  sdemo_pd_wr~product_guid = sdemo_pd~product_guid

  INNER JOIN sdemo_text

  ON  sdemo_text~text_guid = sdemo_pd~description_guid

  AND sdemo_text~langu     = ‘E’.

*——————————————————————–*

connection = zcl_mongo_connection=>connect( ‘192.168.38.52’ ).

db = connection->db( ‘sithh’ ).

collection = db->collection( ‘products’ ).

LOOP AT products

  ASSIGNING <product>.

  <product>-web_address = |http://192.168.38.53:8000{ <product>-web_address }|.

  collection->insert( <product> ).

ENDLOOP.

Simple, isn’t it?

Ok, one short explanation for the <product>-web_address: this is the field, where the web address of the product photo is stored. To simplify the example I’m just storing the Mime repository address of the SAP system, this will not work behind the firewall. In a real scenario you have to export the pictures to your http server.

After executing the report, you have the catalog data as JSON records in your DB.

Reading catalog data

In the application (SAPUI5) we now read the catalog data via the http interface (JSONP, because the http server and the http interface are using different ports!) and bind the data to the model class and the table rows:

<!– load table content via JSONP –>

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=”http://192.168.38.52:27080/sithh/products/_find?callback=bindcatalog“></script>

// Callback function from Mongo DB (JSONP)

function bindcatalog (testdata) {

          oModel.setData(testdata);

          oTable.bindRows(“results”);

};

Result:

After adding some products to the shopping cart, we are ready to order:

As mentioned already above, the http server and the interface are using different ports, so we have to use Ajax for a cross domain POST:

$.ajax({

   type: ‘POST’,

   url: “http://192.168.38.52:27080/sithh/orders/_insert” ,

   data: “docs=” + oOrderModel.getJSON(),

   crossDomain: true,

…

});

In the ERP system we are now able to read the incoming orders (via job) and create customer master data, sales orders or what ever.

DATA: connection TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_connection,

      db         TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_db,

      collection TYPE REF TO zcl_mongo_collection,

      result     TYPE string,

      json_doc   TYPE REF TO zcl_json_document,

      dump       TYPE string_table.

FIELD-SYMBOLS: <line> TYPE string.

*——————————————————————–*

connection = zcl_mongo_connection=>connect( ‘192.168.38.52’ ).

db = connection->db( ‘sithh’ ).

collection = db->collection( ‘orders’ ).

collection->find( IMPORTING result = result ).

json_doc = zcl_json_document=>create_with_json( result ).

json_doc->dumps( IMPORTING result = dump ).

LOOP AT dump

  ASSIGNING <line>.

  WRITE:/ <line>.

ENDLOOP.

The last lines (after json_doc->dumps) are only used to format the output.

Have fun! (easy, if you are using #sapui5 and a NoSQL database 😆 )

Cartoon used with friendly permission by Oliver Widder

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2011/12/the-hard-life-of-a-nosql-coder.html

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