Using SAP Hana Cloud Integration (HCI) with SAP Cloud Connector
While trying on the SAP Hana Cloud Integration trial version for integration with on premise SAP systems and cloud SAP applications – one issue of concern is the connection between SAP HCI and on premise SAP PI or ECC system from network perspective. The reverse proxy approach is not always the best approach and the client network teams are sometimes reluctant to have firewall rules modified with service end points. SAP Cloud Connector based on SAP Hana Cloud Platform can be an easy to use alternative in this case and it also handles propagation of the cloud user identity in a trusted manner to on-premise SAP system.
For testing purpose only, let us try in this blog to reach the ping service on On Premise SAP system from SAP Hana Cloud Integration using SAP Cloud Connector.
SAP Hana Cloud Platform and SAP Hana Cloud Integration trial user has been used to set up the connection.
- Activate the HTTP service in sicf transaction. Once activated successfully the following link can be checked in local browser or you can use the ‘Test Service’ option shown below. http://<on premise sap hostname>:<port>/sap/public/ping?sap-client=<client>
In this blog we will try to reach this onPremise ping service from SAP HCI and capture the response i.e ‘Server reached successfully’ in a file.
2. Setting up SAP Cloud Connector
For setting up the SAP Cloud Connector please refer to the following link :
http://hcp.sap.com/developers/TutorialCatalog/con100_1_setting_up_cloud_connector.html
Refer to the section ‘Install the SCC’ section for installing the cloud connector and ‘Establish connection to your cloud account’ to setup the connection to your SAP HCP trial account.
3. Setting up the Connectivity application in SAP Hana Cloud Platform from Eclipse
For this example, we will use the connectivity sample from the SAP Hana Cloud Platform SDK available from https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/#cloud
The ‘connectivity’ project is imported into Eclipse and deployed in SAP Hana Cloud platform as described in Rui ‘s opensap course on SAP Hana Cloud Platform. This is basically a servlet which requests data from onPremise system and passes this to the calling system in this case SAP HCI system. The primary steps are outlined below :
- The Hana Cloud Platform server is setup in Eclipse as below :
.b. Right click on the imported project and Run On Server to deploy the application in SAP Hana Cloud Platform.
c. Double click on the server and adjust the URL destination ‘backend-no-auth-destination’ to the subpath – /sap/public/ping?sap-client=<client>.The hostname and port does not need to be the actual onpremise SAP server and we will set the mapping of system names in next step. We are using here the destination ‘backend-no-auth-destination’ which is provided in the sample ‘connectivity’as well.
d. Set the mapping of the external system and internal actual hostname in SAP cloud connector:
4. Setup SAP HCI iFlow to reach onPremise SAP system as below. The iFlow fetches the HTTP response from onPremise and writes it into a file in SFTP server
Note that in the receiver channel the Query should start with ‘&’.
The URL Address to be used in the receiver channel can be taken from Eclipse as below :
5. Set the ‘Timer start event’ in the HCI iFlow to ‘Run Once’ and deploy the project in your HCI Tenant.
6. Monitoring :
a. Once it is deployed successfully, the message monitoring in HCI can be checked for failures.
The message processing log is shown below on selecting the message in the ‘Properties’ tab.
b. Logs in the SAP Cloud Connector can be checked in the ‘Logs’ link in the left pane after logging in to SAP Cloud Connector.
7. Checking the result :
The file is checked in the path in SFTP server which is mentioned in the HCI receiver channel. The file has the response from onPremise ping service confirming the connectivity setup.
For a number of cases, for example when cloud applications like Successfactors (for example Employee Replication interface from SF to SAP ECC) is being integrated with on Premise SAP using SAP HCI , SAP Cloud Connector can be a helpful tool and hope SAP will have a recommended approach at some point of time to frequently use the Cloud Connector with SAP HCI Integrations.
Hello Subhro,
Nice blog and easy use of available tools from SAP. Cloud Connector will hopefully be a widely used tool in near future.
Best regards,
Fons
Thank you for this article!
Question for you - could we not just use the Cloud connector to directly integrate the Cloud application and the on-premise backend (and eliminate the use of HCI altogether), or does it depend on the Cloud application that is being "connected"?
Hi Jeffrey,
This depends on scenarios.
So when we have middleware requirements like mapping of the cloud application data to the on premise data format , or protocol conversion that you will want to handle before reaching the cloud connector (which supports HTTP and RFC) - using of SAP HCI becomes helpful. It may also be the case that the integration content (for example for applications like Successfactors), is already present in SAP HCI.
In cases for example when we have a custom web application running on cloud which uses the data from the on premise backend and handles the data conversion itself , HCI will not be required.
Thanks Subhro!
Nicely documented post - thank you!
Indeed a wonderfull blog.. "Cloud connector" , the unbreakable bridge between Cloud and On-premise.
Hi Subro,
For SuccessFactors<-> HCI<->PI( On -premise)->Legacy does SAP recommend to use Cloud connector?
I've read the Cloud connector documentation and it clearly say it is to be used for HCP to On-premise systems ( which supports HTTP(S), RFC(SNC)).
Also the connector support only JDBC and ODBC protocol for outbound connection.
Subhro,
Nicely documented. Apart from SAP ECC, if the customer has any other 3rd party ERP (ex: peoplesoft/Oracle EBS) should they also use cloud connector to connect these ERP's with HCI?
Hi Subhro,
Thanks for sharing the Info, I have few questions:
1. When customer get the SAP HCI Application Edition Licence does it automatically get's SCC licence or it has to separately purchased. Since we only have SAP HCI Application Edition Licence we get following error when try to run the connectivity application on HCP "Cannot start application 'connectivity' there is no compute unit quota for account XXX".
2. In you blog you have deployed sample connectivity application on HCP and then used the HCI iflow to call it, if we are using HCI then we can directly call the on-premise service from HCI iflow, why do we need to deploy and go through steps related to connectivity application to test the connectivity?
Thanks,
Nilesh
Hello everybody!
I'm newbie on HCI, i'd like to know about quotas management? What's this for? My HCI account show the next message "No quotas were purchased for this global account" Is that mean i can't use it for deploying iflows or adapters?
Thank you!
Sam.