Iphone App connection to SAP - Tutorial?

[Former Member]

Hi @ all,

since some weeks I get more and more apple-fan.

At the moment I'm trying to develope my own iphone-apps. I recognized that ABAP is not the same as objective C - but OK - some extra work for me!

My aim is to develope iphone-apps which can connect to an SAP-System. At first "only" reading data - later i want to execute some transactions.

Does anybody know if there's some kind of tutorial how to connect to SAP?

For any information I'm very grateful!

Best regards,

Torsten

[Former Member]

RFC is probably not an option (AFAIK, there is no RFC SDK available thats compiled for iPhone OS as a target).

So maybe you could use SOAP or REST web services, or even plain HTTP (by implementing an HTTP request handler). You'd essentially be implementing an ABAP class (implementing the IF_HTTP_EXTENSION interface) which will be invoked whenever an HTTP method is invoked for your URL:

[http://help.sap.com/SAPHELP_470/Helpdata/EN/78/985299c06b11d4ad310000e83539c3/frameset.htm]

If you want offline to data, then you could write a 'DOE application' and then a custom DOE client for the iPhone:

[http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/30e033a0-73ef-2b10-b291-b653c3b48385]

Here again, the document provides RFC FMs, which you could invoke in an HTTP request handler in ABAP.

Then on the iPhone, simply use HTTP request/response classes to talk to the server. You'll probably be using the NSMutableURLRequest class (provided by Apple) on the iPhone.

[Former Member]

So it is obligatory that I have to use a SAP Web Application Server ?

[Former Member]

Its not obligatory. ICM (which is shipped with the WebAS) is one of the ways you can get the iPhone to get data.

If you have a system that only talks RFC (and doesn't have ICM), then you could write a separate program (i.e. outside the ABAP process) using the RFC SDK which will call this RFC and then transform and returns the result in a form the iPhone can understand (XML/JSON, whatever) whenever the iPhone asks for data. This means another server between your R/3 backend and the iPhone.

I believe the precursor for ICM was ITS. Maybe you could look into that? I have no idea about it though:

[http://www.sap-img.com/bc046.htm]

By the way, have you seen this?:

[http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/30c0db18-7894-2c10-379b-803471136b55?quicklink=index&overridelayout=true]

Its probably the tutorial you are looking for.

Cheers!

PS: These are not necessarily the only ways to do it. There might be more (and maybe I'm ignorant).