SAP Experts: Consulting | Integration | Virtualization - DataXstream
SAP Certified Consultants
SAP is announcing a new version of SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET 3.0 (now called “NCo 3.0″). A beta program for selected customers and partners is currently underway (Q3, 2010) with the general release of the software coming soon thereafter. I will highlight some of the major differences between the SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET 2.0 and NCo 3.0 (besides the obvious, and much-needed name-shortening).
EDITOR’S NOTE: NCo 3.0 has now been released. Read more details here.
You may have heard the following idiom before:
Too many cooks spoil the broth
The common meaning extracted from this saying is that too many people working on a single task tend to make a mess of it. But, what happens when you have too many developers working in a single piece of ABAP code? That’s right, you get a big mess. This issue is especially difficult to deal with when there are multiple functional requirements leveraging the same custom code object, form-based user-exit, or function-based user-exit.
While current releases of SAP (those built on SAP NetWeaver 2004s and later) have good built-in handling of enhancements and customizations via implicit and explicit enhancement points and BADIs, there still exists many old-school user-exits.
I recently worked on a project where three separate developers were creating three separate interfaces based on the outbound delivery IDOC. While the development for all three interfaces was occurring at the same time, the go-live date for each of the interfaces were different (we’ll discuss that project management glitch at another time). Each interface required a separate set of custom fields and, therefore, it’s own IDOC extension. The problem is there is only one appropriate user-exit in IDOC_OUTPUT_DELVRY and three developers needed to be developing in it at the same time!
How did we solve this problem?
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I recently posted a blog about how to implement field-level IDOC reduction for the HRMD_A message type. In short, the standard SAP transaction to reduce IDOC segments and fields (transaction BD53) can’t be used because the field-level reduction is ignored by SAP. My solution leveraged TVARV as a repository for the fields to clear. Read the whole solution here. A colleague of mine was very quick to point out that instead of using TVARV as the method for controlling which fields are cleared, I should have continued to leverage transaction BD53 for the IDOC reduction maintenance and changed my code to look up field level reductions in table TBD24.
What a great idea! Too bad I hate this suggestion… and it’s all SAP’s fault!!
I love ALE. It is super-powerful and, once you get the hang of it, is a snap to configure. Recently, I was setting up an HRMD_A interface for my client. Everything was going smoothly until I ran into a requirement to filter out the social security number (PERID), birthdate (GBDAT), and gender (GESCH) for privacy reasons. All of these fields are in segment E1P0002. Initially, I thought that this requirement was easy enough to accomplish. I just created a IDOC reduction in transaction BD53 and filtered out the three fields. I soon found out that while entire segments were getting reduced from the IDOC as configured, the individually reduced fields were still showing up in the IDOC. What’s going on?!?
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In support of an synchronous XI interface (SOAP->XI->RFC), I changed the underlying structure of one of the RFC parameters. I appended some fields to the end of a return structure in ECC. I re-imported the RFC meta data to the Integration Repository as always and mapped the fields accordingly. When I executed the interface, the fields that I added did NOT appear in the XML. This is because the XI runtime cache did not have the updated metadata for the RFC.
To update the runtime cache (called CPA Cache), enter the following URL in your web browser http://<host>:5<sys#>00/CPACache/refresh?mode=full. XI will do the rest of the work for you. After the CPA cache is refreshed, the new RFC meta data reflects the newly added fields.
These other CPA Cache URLs may also be helpful:
CPA Cache Monitoring: http://<host>:5<sys#>00/CPACache
Delta CPA Cache Refresh: http://<host>:5<sys#>00/CPACache/refresh?mode=delta
Full CPA Cache Refresh: http://<host>:5<sys#>00/CPACache/refresh?mode=full
One of the more confounding aspects of developing in the SAP space is the lack of good, low-level, helpful instructions. While this post is merely regurgitating information that is readily available elsewhere, it will be done in a manner that (hopefully) will actually be useful to vast majority of ABAP developers out there that, like me, find a lot of SAP’s implementation of web services on the ABAP stack confusing.
Debugging a web service on the ABAP stack of SAP Web Application Server is a very useful procedure to know. Here’s how you do it.
Today, I got an email from one of my co-workers at my client with a very good question. This developer had created an ABAP function to return SAP data. Then, he exposed this function as a web service. Due to changes in functional scope, he had to change the function interface. After he made all his changes and unit tested the ABAP code, he was surprised to find that his web service was still adhering to the old function interface. He tried deleting and recreating the web service, but ran in to problems. He was stuck in a pickle and needed a little push in the right direction.
This blog is a recap of the liveblog of the SAP TechEd 09 conference Demo Jam. To read in chronological order, start from the bottom and work your way up.
Are you stuck in your cube while Bob from BASIS is heading to SAP TechEd 09 in sunny Phoenix? Are you afraid that you’ll miss out on all the sun and fun? While we can’t send the sun, we’ll try to bring you the fun. DataXstream will be liveblogging at SAP TechEd 09.
Head over to live.dataxstream.com on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 to get up to second updates from the show. We will be getting our liveblog on starting at 8am PDT (that’s 11am for you right-coasters) for the general keynote session. We’ll also be liveblogging from SAP TechEd 09 Demo Jam at 8pm PDT on Tuesday. The Demo Jam promises to be a great time, so plan to join us online after you put the kiddies to bed!
This is our first foray into liveblogging. Hopefully it will go off without too many technical glitches. We hope you’ll enjoy following the events with us!
