Automatically update external customer websites

[Former Member]

Hi experts,

In our company a group of customer service people log onto customer's websites to input invoice information. As you can imagine its very time consuming and costly. I know that there're a lot of EDI or electronic solutions out there to solve this problem, but many of our customers are not willing to setup more advanced connections due to cost and maintenance considerations. So my question is: How can we automatically logon to customers websites and update on their web apps? I'm not talking about EDI or WebService, but simply use a program to log onto a website and populate data/push buttons, like doing a BDC on a web site. Does SAP ABAP support such kind of scripting?

Any help is highly appreciated.

Thanks

Luis

[mvoros]

Hi,

I don't think there is anything like that in ABAP unless you can use SECATT for this. I've never tried it for external website. But here is an idea. There is a tool called Selenium HQ which can be used to test web pages. You can create your test scripts in Selenium IDE (Firefox Addon). It also allows you to write/modify your test scripts using various languages such as Java or Ruby. You can also run your scripts on server. So theoretically, you could record a test script for customer's site. Export it into your favorite programming language and modify it to accept input values from a text file. ABAP program would collect data and export them into text file. As a last step it would execute an external command to run test script. Don't take it too seriously, it should be working but it may be too shaky for enterprise environment.

Cheers

[Former Member]

Hi Martin,

Thanks very much for your help, the use of Selenium is really a good idea. Although I agree with you that it's probably too shaky for an enterprise environment, it's still worth a try as we might be able to incorporate this functionality as a semi-auto solution to gain a little bit productivity improvement.

Thanks again for your help, I'll leave the question as unanswered and come back later to update my tests and findings.

Best regards

Luis

[former_member182485]

Hi,

Develop a BAPI which will take customer no etc as input and will give data which you want to update to customer website as output.

Now develop a webservice using .Net.

I am sure developping a web service using .Net is the chepest and widly acceptable across the globe.

Give this web service to your customer and ask them to call this webservice and take real time update.

[Former Member]

Hi Bikas,

Thanks very much for your reply, but I'm sorry that I may not have explained myself clearly as a large part of our customers simply refuse to setup any electronics connections with us and their website is the only place they accept our billing and other information, hence the webservice approach would not work.

Thanks anyways for your kind help

Luis

[Former Member]

Hi Luis!

Almost for sure you can do that. You can make an http_post and "imitate" a web browser. If there not many web pages to send data is pretty easy .

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Esteban

[Former Member]

Dear friends,

I'm closing this thread as this reqeust has been dropped by the busines and more importantly all proposed approaches are a little bit too shaky for enterprise applications. Thanks very much for your help anyways!

Thanks

Luis