Send PDF output Forms to external Customer Portal

[Former Member]

Hello All,

We have an external, custom written customer portal that access data from SAP and several other legacy systems. The business wants the portal to have the functionality so a customer can re-print an Order Acknowledgement, Bill of Lading (Delivery), or Invoice. The portal will be providing me with the document number. Is it possible to print these documents and send the portal the PDF view of the document? The Order Acknowledgement is an Adobe form, the other 2 are smartforms.

Thank you in advance,

Jay

[OttoGold]

Hello,

I am not sure if I get your situation, but will give a try. If that does not work they way I think, correct me.

You have a custom portal. You have a page in this portal, like JSP page or .NET page or something, which should let the user view a business document, like invoice, with the number which is available in this page. And you have a SAP system...with ADS installed? Or not? from where you want to get the PDF files for the documents with certain number.

You options:

- you can recreate all the printing in the portal, for example like this:

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use SAP connector (like .NET or Jco connector) to access the SAP system and read the data (you will use the connector to call a BAPI in the SAP system and will use the raw data in the portal

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create a JSP layout with the SAP system data looking the way you want to have the print

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if you don´t want to work with like CSS styles and web pages for the print, you can use the data and library like iText to create the whole PDF file which you will then be able to print/ archive/ send

- you can use all the printing from SAP

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Adobe form exists as a PDF already, you can convert smartform into a PDF file easily

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you will create a webservice, which will have a document type and document number as an imput parameter and the logic of the webservice will trigger the printing program, will get the data of the print (like PDF stream) and will return the data as a response to the customer portal

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Or you can use some fancy function modules to send the files to some FTP destination, if you don´t like to handle the webservice data stream response

or there may be some more options... but one of the two above should easily solve your problem.

Regards Otto