IDocs or Enterprise Services in message exchange between systems

[Former Member]

I am trying to get some qualitative and quantitative answers to the comparison of Enterprise Services or IDocs as a choice of interface technology when exchanging messages via PI with external systems.

The external systems are probably going to have their own message format, so this would concern the nature of the interfaces of the ERP system interfaces to the PI system.

I have seen one other posting in this forum related to this, but no definitive answer.

Does anybody have any system performance comparisons using the two technologies, such as message throughput / hour? Not easy to compare I know.

Does anybody have an opinion as to the suitability of Enterprise Services for such a task? Is the technology stable enough to be trusted yet?

When comparing status messages of IDocs, do the Enterprise Services have a similar way of easuly seeing the delivery status of the message using the Enterprise Service?

Would anybody or has anybody actually been brave enough to use Enterprise Services in this way yet?

Are Enterprise Services appropriate for mass messaging?

All answers very much appreciated!

Kind Regards,

Tony.

[former_member206760]

Dear Tony ,

to my knowledge ...ES are nothing but proxies if you are using PI to interact with them...

So wat i would say is

Go for IDOC if you have a standard idoc available for the functionality...as you will have to do no coding and the error handling will also be in bulit

but there are chances where std idocs are not available ..also there are systems where there is no concept of idocs like BW system ..you can develop a ES / proxy and use but you will have to code for functionality and error handling..

hope this helps

[Former Member]

Hi Tarang,

Have you got any practical experience of implementing the services? How is the error handling compared to IDocs if you can comment?

Kind Regards,

Tony.

[MichalKrawczyk]

Hi,

>>Have you got any practical experience of implementing the services? How is the error handling compared to IDocs if you can comment?

as you've already noticedyour questions are VERY general so hard to

say anything without asking tons of questions at first

if you want to compare IDocs to services then I assume

we're talking about async services right?

(and most services - just like bapis - are sync messages)

so you compare two different things

the same applies to comparing message volume tests ?

the technology is different per interface, why?

some IDOCs use BAPIs and some batch inputs

if services use BAPis than what's the differece - very little

but with BAPI and batch input then you may see some I guess with

large volumes

>>>When comparing status messages of IDocs, do the Enterprise Services have a similar way of easuly seeing the delivery status of the message using the Enterprise Service?

with async or sync ?

there are no ALEAUD for services and reliable messaging must

be supported by the sender application too right ?

>>>Are Enterprise Services appropriate for mass messaging?

if you're talking about migrations etc I don't believe services

will be used with LSMW but BAPIs are on the other hand

Regards,

Michal Krawczyk

[Former Member]

Hi Michal,

Thanks for the reply. I try to respond to your questions precisely:

if you want to compare IDocs to services then I assume 
we're talking about async services right? 
(and most services - just like bapis - are sync messages) 
so you compare two different things

Yes, I know. What if the message scenario was asynchronous, and you chose not to handle the response message of the Enterprise Service? You could still do that, right? Then the problem becomes how do you trace the status of the Enterprise Service transaction.

IDocs have the advantage of a status message, and a good message monitoring system, but I am not sure if the visibility of errors seen with Enterprise Services if treated asynchronously would be as obvious. My knowledge of the runtime of the Enterprise Services is currently a bit limited.

The whole reason for me asking about the use of Enterprise Services is that there are so many now that could be used for message exchange, if they were suitable for the task.

Also, what about creating Asynchronous/Synchronous bridges in PI to handle the response message? Then the response is always traceable, correct? Even if the customer doesn't want the response message, the content could always be found in the PI message monitor.

Additionally, there is a transaction in ERP that wraps a BAPI into an IDoc (don't have a system in front of me at the moment and cannot recall the transaction, maybe OM69 or something similar). Now, that is taking a synchronous 'service' (the BAPI), and converting it into an asynchronous IDoc. So if this is such a bad idea, why do SAP provide the transaction? Therefore, by extension, wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing for Enterprise Services, at least from a philosophical point of view? I mean, why would SAP imply you could do this for one kind of synchronous service (the BAPIs) but not others (the Enterprise Services)?

if you're talking about migrations etc I don't believe services 
will be used with LSMW but BAPIs are on the other hand

No, I was talking about high volume message scenarios, sorry for the ambiguity. I guess if the performance of Enterprise Services is comparible to that of well written BAPIs, the answer is 'yes', correct?

Kind Regards,

Tony.

[Former Member]

Hi,

In reference to another posting on this forum, please reference this link:

http://esoadocu.sap.com/socoview(bD1lbiZjPTAwMSZkPW1pbg==)/render.asp?packageid=484F2D49F106E577E100...

which desribes the use of the Enterprise Service Maintain Inbound Delivery based on Despatched Delivery Notification.

This Enterprise Service is clearly stated as running in asynchronous mode, and note the following text:

This service replaces the EDI message processing of IDOC DESADV, the Advanced Shipping Notification (ASN), with function module IDOC_INPUT_DESADV1

So now I really have mixed signals as to the decision to replace IDoc technology with enterprise services.

ANyone know if SAP has a detailed policy statement about this?

[dries_guth]

Anthony,

take a look to a similar block where I posted my comments in some weeks ago. .

Let me know if these 2 cent could help you.

Kind regrads,

Dries

[Former Member]

Hi Dries,

Yes, that post with your reply was the one that I found earlier! To be honest, your reply was the closest to getting some information that I desired, but I still have a long way to go before I commit one way or another.

In two weeks time I will be on the SAP Enterprise Builder course; after that I may be in a better position to evaluate the technology.

My gut feeling at this point is that if nobody has posted anything on this forum, and I cannot see many positive comments, I am going to err on the side of pessimism with the choice of ES instead of IDOcs. In fact, I will need to prototype some scenarios on an avaiable system and evaluate them.

Kind Regards,

Tony.