Best approach with SAP .NET Connector

[Former Member]

Hi all.

In our production web environment we have two web servers and one DB server. The DB server is connected to SAP via a VPN. The web servers cannot connect to SAP.

With DCOM, we deploy the DCOM DLL to our DB server and then create an application proxy in COM+. DCOM calls from the web servers flow through the DB server to SAP.

We would like to keep our setup the same and replace DCOM with the SAP .NET Connector. Is this possible? Will we need to write a web service to handle the requests? What are my other options?

Thanks in advance.

[Former Member]

Hello,

Option 1: Similar to your current approach with the DCOM Connector, you deploy the .NET Connector assemblies on the DB server and make calls from the ASP.NET apps running on the web servers to the DB server over .NET Remoting.

Option 2: Setup a VPN connection from the web server directly to SAP and deploy the .NET Connector assemblies on the web server without using the DB server.

Of course, you can also implement a web service using the .NET Connector and deploy it on the DB server. Then your web apps running on the web server will access to the web service over SOAP.

The answer to which one is better depends on ... ,etc. I personally prefer the option 2 because of the better performance.

Regards,

Guangwei

[Former Member]

Have you ever implemented the web service approach? Or heard of anyone else that has? Is it difficult to do because of the type limitations in web services?

Ideally I would like to take this approach and have our classic ASP applications communicate to the web service via the SOAP toolkit.

Thanks for any help.

[Former Member]

I have an implementation with web services. The web service calls a BAPI, the information is returned in XML format. I'm calling this webservice from ASP.net and with SOAP Toolkit in ASP pages, and also I downloaded the Microsoft Office 2003 Webservices toolkit and I'm calling the webservice from Excel.

It's very easy to implement in that way.

Hope this helps.

[Former Member]

Thanks Rafael. It helps me to know that someone has actually done a successful implementation.

In the BAPI that you were calling, were any of the input parameters complex data structures? How did you represent them in classic ASP? Most of the BAPI's that I will be accessing have a lot of parameters that are complex data structures.

[Former Member]

Why not just base your return structure from the web service to what you need. Unless, of course, you are using all the data that is returned from the BAPI.

I've gone the WS route too and instead of returning the complex structure similar to what's returned from the BAPI, I created my own structure with limited useful data for my environment.

[Former Member]

That will work in some case Hithesh. In other cases you need the full structures.

And I'm actually not too worried about the ouput parameters, but rather the input parameters which will be built in classic ASP that doesn't have the nice types that ASP.NET and the .NET Connector have.

Message was edited by: Syndicate