Web Services and Business ByDesign
Business on Demand has been working with ByDesign for the last 3 years and one of the biggest areas of mystery has been using Web-services.
We like most ByDesign partners have been through the mill trying to work with some of the external development community who claim to know more more than anyone else about this particular topic. We have found that on more than one occasion reading the help provided by SAP seems to be all the qualification that sub-contractors need in order to be able to claim to be experts. It is a significant waste of time and financial resources to brief a sub-contractor to find out some time later that they are using your project to learn the product and probably know less than we do!
To this end we have recently embarked on a few projects to implement Web-service communication to SAP ByDesign in a number of different areas of the product and we been particularly successful with this. 
We now can genuinely claim to be experts in making the connection (to the SAP ByDesign system) and in transforming data both into and out of ByDesign (we are using both the Synchronous and Asynchronous Web-services).
We do however have a problem – SAP ByDesign Web-services seem to be pretty straightforward however the documentation around the different ‘fields’ and how to use them is sadly lacking. There are numerous places where fields are ‘compulsory’ but there is no explanation of where to look up this field in the system you are working with.
Most frustrating as once using these (Web-services) transactions become commonplace the use of SAP ByDesign will accelerate further. We would welcome discussion with other members of the community and SAP Development as we believe that this is and area for potential growth.
We will keep plugging away at the transactions where there is little or no explanation as most customers only want to be able to create or amend data from elsewhere and not worry about the SAP pre-requisites – That is our job, making the ‘impossible’ look easy.
We will be writing again on this but in the meantime if there are more sources of information that have been missed please let me know and we will incorporate these into this blog.
I will be interested to see what you add to this topic as it has been covered in a lot of blog posts previously. especially in the SAP Cloud Applications Studio section.
We have been using these and creating our own for quite a while at Navigator and I am curious as to why you feel they are not common place already? They have been in the product from the inception. We at Navigator have developed our i-Connect suite of integrations around these. Thee include (EDI,SalesForce,Various ECommerce Platforms, Point of Sale systems,Service, Dispatch, and many others )
Are you planning on covering the REST services out of ByDesign? because that is a topic which is lacking any real Discussion.
I'd also REALLY appreciate
a) a better documentation, the current one is … no comment
b) a REST interface. Everybody in the modern cloud world does REST. Why do I still have to handle this old clunky SOAP stuff?
c) Why do I have to supply thousands of parameters with default values and no further use?
Hi Thomas,
In regards to the REST interface. Have you tried using the via Mashup?
From what I understood these MashUps are only used to CONSUME webservices from other web sources, not to view or modify data WITHIN ByDesign from an external application.
You are Correct Thomas, the rest mashup Fabio mentions is to pull data from an external system... Bydesign has Rest capabilities for pulling out data-sources but I have found it not intuitive or documented