After following John Moy’s blog series on setting up the Netweaver Gateway trial on Amazon EC2, I thought it would be helpful to share how to connect your shiny new gateway trial to the ES Workplace ERP. Since using the ES Workplace systems a couple years ago for a CRM Mobile app, I have always praised the ES team for putting together a great set of resources for encouraging and enabling a service oriented architecture (SOA). The systems (ECC, CRM and PI) are great for doing testing against and developing POC’s or demo apps. In this case we will be using the ERP instance to connect our Gateway system for data consumption.
In this example we will be initially connecting our systems together and then going through setting up a very basic example of consuming data from the ES Workplace ERP system via the Netweaver Gateway system sitting in the AWS cloud.
Please note that the Prepackaged Netweaver Gateway Trials already have this configured and ready for your username/password.
| In order to connect and consume data from the ES Workplace ERP system, you will need an account. You can create one here and it only takes a couple of minutes: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/soareg | |
| Once you have created your account, I suggest logging in and changing the initial password you received through registration. Its also just a good idea to check you are able to gain access to avoid any issues down the road. | |
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Next up head over to your Netweaver Gateway Trial system and open up SPRO -> SAP Netweaver -> Gateway -> OData Channel -> Configuration -> Connection Settings ->SAP Netweaver Gateway to SAP System -> Manage RFC Destinations |
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| Click on ABAP Connections and select the “New” icon. |  |
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Name your RFC Destination and make sure that Connection Type is configured to be 3 – ABAP Connection. Under Technical Settings enter the following values: Target Host: iwdfvm3989 System Number: 00 Save As: IP Address Gateway Host: /H/155.56.56.170/S/3299/W/e$workp1ace/H/iwdfvm3989.dmzwdf.sap.corp Gateway Service: 3300 |
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next click the “Logon & Security” Tab and enter your ES Gateway Credentials and save the connection. |
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| After saving, select “Manage SAP System Aliases” and enter the details which will create a system alias for the ES Workplace ERP system. |  |
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SAP System Alias: Any name e.g. ESW RFC Connection: Should be the name of your RFC connection you specified above Software Version: Default |
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| Click the connection test button and you should receive a screen looking like this. |  |
| Once this is done, we are ready to create our webservice. |
For our consumption example we will be pulling out a simple list of all users. If you would like to see a complete and detailed guide of CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations.
| Open up SE80 and create your Gateway Data Model. |  |
| Be sure to specify your System Alias when creating the Model. |  |
| Per the documentation, search for a BAPI you would like to use. Because we defined the System Alias in the previous step, the BAPIs being displayed are coming from the target system, in this case the ES Workplace machine. |  |
| Continue through the process by mapping the query operation.Also be sure to set a primary key by highlighting your unique property and clicking the “Key” button. Once done, click “generate”. |  |
| Next up we will create a consumption model for our data model. Open up SE80 again and attach the gateway data model to consumption model. |  |
| Now we should be done, you can open up the browser and point to your URL listed in SE80 under the consumption model to see the definition and available collections. |
This is directly on the AWS machine, but I can also call this from my local machine: |
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Troubleshooting: In the event you try to view a collection and receive the error: No System Alias found for Service, open up SPRO and assign a System Alias to the Service. |
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| Here you can see where the ESWORKPLACE alias has been defined. |  |
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Having additional problems? Check that the service has been defined in SICF |
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| If you queries are taking a long time to load or your dataset is large, don’t forget to limit it/add parameters to restrict the returned records. This can be done when defining the data model. |  |
| If your service will display locally on AWS but not from another machine, check that the AWS Security Rules include the port gateway is running on (in my case 8000). | |
| If you try to view the detail of the you will get an error, this is because I did not map the operation of GetDetail or Read – we only did the Query. Follow the guide to easily add this. |
If you have a elastic IP associated with you EC2 instance you should be able to call the REST service from any machine connected to internet. (You could also use your public DNS name, its just not all the short!).
Here are a couple of useful TCodes for working with Gateway:
| /IWFND/ERROR_LOG | Gateway Error Log |
| /IWFND/APPS_LOG |
Gateway Application Log Viewer |
| /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE | Maintain Service |
Hello Paul,
Many thanks for sharing it. I have a query for you and would like to have your key insight on it.
It would help us in resolving the issue.
I along with my team have been trying to setup SAP cart approval process but have been stuck with an issue.
We are facing “HTTP BAD Request” for the url http://10.243.115.69:8000/sap/opu/sdata/gbsrm/cartapproval/SrmapprovalemployeeCollection?sap-language=en
The other URLs like http://10.243.115.69:8000/sap/opu/sdata/gbsrm/cartapproval/SrmapprovaldecisionsCollection?sap-language=en is working fine.
Netweaver Gateway is on SP3.
Thanks and Regards,
Ankit
Hello Ankit,
Since your other URL’s are working correctly I would believe the issue may be with the data model, consumption model or the request header. Check this document for some suggestions: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_gateway20sp04/helpdata/en/60/ef07a62a304d4589ec4ba5aac03102/content.htm
Generally a 400 bad request means the data was not in the correct format and essentially “malformed’. I assume you are using something like RESTClient for Firefox? If not, this webapp can show you all data being parsed in the header and may point to your problem. Please also try to remove the “sap-language” parameter and test.
Paul
Hi Paul,
One small question, is creating a data model for Standard Application like SRM Shopping Cart Approval is mandatory ?
Looking forward to hear from you.
Regards,
Srinivas Divakarla
Hi Srinivas,
Yes – Based on my experience – Gateway has a small group of basic “predefined” data models but for most cases you will need to create your own.
Paul
Hi Srinivas – you can find the predefined data models here:
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_gateway20sp05/helpdata/en/10/2b9c8a863a451ebe6bd4358d9d6adb/frameset.htm
Both OData and Generic.
Hope this helps, Paul
Hi there
Might be wrong, but it looks like ES Workplace doesn’t want you to sign on using RFC anymore. I followed the above steps, but can’t get a BAPI result set in SE80.
When performing an authorization check in SM59 (Utilities->Test->Authorization Test), I am getting the following message:
“hostname ‘iwdfvm3989’ unknown / User (…) has no RFC authorization for functi”
Are ESW users not allowed to perform RFCs on the ESW ERP system anymore?
Kind regards,
M
isn’t ES Workplace going to get decomissioned even if you can get it to work before it happens?
Hi Michael, unfortunately Greg may be correct. I received notice a couple days ago that ESW was to be shut down and they may have started locking it down. This also means no easy way to test services like this without having your own ECC/CRM system which is a pity. I will try to reach out to the ESW team for a response and keep you posted.
Paul
Hi Paul
Thanks for your quick response.
I had noticed the news about ESW, but passwords are still being refreshed, so I assumed that access is still.possible.I can actually still sign on via WebGUI, fwiw.
I’ve also had a response on Twitter that services in this space are merged at or by end of March.
Stuttering innovation, eh? 😉