How to implement FTP transmission scenario

[Former Member]

Hi everybody!

Sorry, this is a rather long post, but I think the scenario is pretty complicated...

I have to implement an exchange of flat file data using the FTP protocol. I do not think this is possible using the standard FTP adapter, since there are some difficulties in the procedure:

First of all, the communication partner is a host-based system that only "simulates" an FTP server. The actual transmission steps are:

1) Connect to the host using username / password

2) Send a host-specific command using the 'site' command, i. e. something like (in MS-DOS like ftp syntax): 'quote site xyz=123'

3) Send a special ticket-file which contains additional instructions to the host-system

4) Send or receive an FTP file using the conventional 'PUT' or 'GET' commands.

As far as I can tell, this has to be done using ordinary ABAP programming - no problem there. But how can I bridge the gap between my ABAP program and XI messaging?

• Should I create an ABAP job, read the data and somehow post it into the XI queue (how?) (inbound direction only)?. Should I start a workflow and pass the data to it (how?)?

• Should I create a business workflow and start an ABAP program within this process (how?), starting this workflow via job scheduling?

I must admit I'm at a loss here. Any suggestions from you?

Best regards, Joerg

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

option:

1. If your application system is on WAS 620 or above, you can write a report and use this report to get the data and then call a ABAP Proxy to send data to SAP XI.

2. YOu can use Report and call an RFC which will send data to SAP XI.

The above option is if this is not possible from File adapter.

File adapter has option for Unix command.

Regards

Vijaya

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone!

Thank you for your suggestions. I have considered this for a while and there still are some open questions...

First, I have to elaborate a bit on the specific scenario: There is an external host system, which is only accessible using FTP. The "standard" FTP adapter of XI is useless, since there are several non-standard steps involved which are not supported in the standard.

The XI system will be the only system "allowed" to communicate with the host - due to network and firewall restrictions.

The data from the host system will have to be processed by a backend SAP system. This R/3 system (release 6.20) will only have a connection to the XI system. There is a RFC FM for this purpose.

So if I follow your suggestions, I would have to do the following:

1) Import the RFC FM from the R/3 backend into XI

2) Generate a suitable interface spec. for this RFC along with mapping objects, etc.

3) Create an ABAP server proxy for this RFC

4) Create an ABAP client proxy for this server proxy

5) Create a report that will download the data from the host system and "post" ist to the XI message queue using the client proxy from step 4)

Sounds a bit strange - is this really a useful implementation?

Regards, Joerg

[Former Member]

If you are considering ABAP alernatives only then may be you can simply ignoer the suggestion but try Java proxies if you can. whatever you want to achieve could be done using Socket programming in Java and FTP client libraries so that you can achieve the non-standard functionality before the actual ftp stuff.