XI: IDOC to IDOC tunneling - how fast (and easy) can you get?

[MichalKrawczyk]

Exchange infrastructure may be implemented in many environments
where IDOC exchange between different SAP systems has been working
for a very long time. You can use XI with new scenarios but is it realy not worth
to update the old scenarios too?

1. What could we gain?

IDOC monitoring ... is WE02/WE05 enough? Did you ever have to build your own,
custom monitoring transactions to monitor the IDOC flow? STOP that...
start using the Runtime Workbench.

2. You're affraid it takes too much work to move your IDOC to IDOC scenarios?

You just have to create one object inside the Integration Repository - not even create,
just import the idoc definition - that's all. Then you just have to do the standard
integration directory part.

3. You might be affraid that IDOC exchange through the XI will be slower
then without the use of the integration engine?

Have you heard about the IDOC to IDOC exchange without the XML conversion?

XI allows you to send IDOCs without changing them into XML messages.
If you don't need to do the mapping within the XI you don't have to.

How can you configure such a scenario?

Only one step:

- go to TCODE - SXMB_ADM

- Integration Engine configuration

- set the XML_CONVERSION parameter to value 2

Possible Values (from the Help)

a) 0 - Every IDoc is saved as a table; no IDoc-XML conversion

b) 1 - Every IDoc is converted to IDoc-XML

c) 2 - An IDoc is converted to IDoc-XML if requested by the service



Now when you configure and IDOC to IDOC flow without any mapping you'll see that the tunelling feature is [ON].



The payload of your document won't be application/xml cause when using this option IDOCs
are transported as tables and not as the XML messages.



Probably the IDOC exchange could even be a little bit faster if we could turn [OFF]
another IDOC parameter - SYNTAX_CHECK but since SAP does not recommend doing it this will not be a part of this weblog.