XI & Ep

[Former Member]

I am trying to understand when we can integrate EP & XI? What are the scenarios under which one will use EP & XI to invoke a BAPI/ RFC? What are the advantages of using EP & XI together when compared to just using EP?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

SSG,

There is not hard and fast rule that you will have to EP and XI together. If you know from which system you are going to fetch data, then you can use EP. If your business process is such that you will have to collect data from multiple systems, which you don't know at desing time then probably XI will make sense.

XI - Data integration

EP - User integration.

If you can explain your scenario, probably we can help you more.

Regards,

Ravi

[former_member91687]

Hi,

To add to the above, most of the companies now have heterogenous IT landscapes, and on a daily basis any number of employees must access critical business process from multiple applications, portals come into picture here by allowing an unified, personalized and role based view of your applications.

XI is the core solution which allows a company to integrate different applications which could be A2A, B2B and the like, here you define software components, interfaces, mappings and content-based routing rules.

Both EP and XI are the core components of the netweaver stack apart from BI, MDM, etc, and the usage of either would depend on the organization as they go on to add more SAP applications.

Regards,

Chandra

[Former Member]

Hi,

EP is mainly used for presentation of data. It is a thin client.

This can allow you the flexibility of accesing your mail server and at the same time searching a topic in google, simulatneously.

And how do we achieve this? Using XI. XI acts as a middleware, which takes a place of a "connector" between ep on the user end and various other systems like the google server, mail server , r/3 at the other end.

Take an example where, you would want xi, to pick a file from the file server, transform it into an idoc using r/3, populate that idoc, and show the details of the idoc to the user.

Now, xi connects to the file server, and r/3 does the processing required, and displays the information to the user using EP.

Hope this helps

Regards,

Smitha.

[Former Member]

Hi,

XI and EP are for different purposes.

XI is for data integration and EP is for presentation of the data, as you would know.

SAP XI enables you to implement cross-system processes. It enables you to connect systems from different vendors (non-SAP and SAP) in different versions and implemented in different programming languages (Java, ABAP, and so on) to each other. SAP Exchange Infrastructure is based on an open architecture, uses open standards (in particular those from the XML and Java environments).

EP as ravi mentioned is used to design the front end or User Interfaces. EP will be used to extract the data from your Business Packages and present them in a visually understandable manner.

Coming to the dependencies of EP on XI, I can say that there is absolutely no dependencies. We are on the latest EP and are also using CAF and Guided procedures. We are able to use the entire EP functionality without XI.

Any business package will not have any dependency on XI and EP will connect to the system directly and fetch the data. Business packages as of now will not go through XI.

There are different options in which you can design your portal application with / without XI and so the need to combine them both together or not is purely on a case by case basis.

I think this link should also help u :

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/9d6132b0-0801-0010-86a1-d73...

Regards,

Abhy

[bhavesh_kantilal]

Hi SSG,

There is no straight forward answer to your question.

EP and XI belong to the same Netweaver Stack and are used for different functionalites. While , XI is used for Process Integration of SAP and non SAP systems, EP is used to design FrontEnds such that all info of the SAP systems is easily accesible and easy to maintain.

Now, when there is a need to integrate 2 or more systems and perfrom several complex logic or say stateful message processing is to be done and the final result has to be put to your front end in EP, then the 2 can be used together. there is no hard and fast rule as to when the 2 can or should be used together, and i guess it is a pure architectural and functional decision.