Interface Best Practice

[Former Member]

All,

I'm a newbee to SAP however a .net veteran. I'm task with creating interfaces to and from SAP. Example, push data into SAP and pull data from SAP.

What are some of the best practises? I've done an initial deep dive into SAP and I'm thinking there is value in NetWeaver stack. I would like to get some general thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Your question is so generic and there are so many different interfaces cases that it is very difficult to answer.

My generic advice would be to try to call only published and stable API calls in SAP abap stack like BAPIs for RFC calls and Enterprise Services for SOAP Web Services.

Regards,

Olivier

[Former Member]

Let me give an example. I have credit card expense transaction data provided by our credit card vendor. I need to apply the data to the expense account tables. How would you go about standup up an interface that reads a flat file in process the input into SAP?

[Former Member]

There are plenty of different ways to read data from a flat file into SAP.

The choice will depend completely from the company context and the business rules.

There is no generic "best" solution.

[Former Member]

I added some comments however no sure why the post did not take.

Let me give an example. I will be provided with a flat file with travel expense data and will need to push the data into SAP. What are some possible implementation suggestions?

[Former Member]

I don't understand how you are not able to see yourself some of the different possible implementations and the questions to be asked and answered.

Where is this file ? on the SAP server ?

If not you need to get it. How ? FTP ? SFTP ? Netbios ? NFS ?

If FTP or SFTP, which system will be the client and which the server ?

If SFTP is there an exchange of public key to be done.

Is there an SFTP script to be written and called from SAP ?

If FTP, will sapftp be used ?

Will it be a SAP periodic job polling a directory ?

Will the external system trigger an event in the SAP system ?

Will the external system be able to call an RFC funtion module to start the integration program in the SAP system ?

Will the external system be able to call a WEB service to start the integration program in the SAP system ?

Will an external scheduler able to start a SAP job after the job creating the file.

What will be the periodicity of the file creation ?

Will the name of the file be the same every time ?

Will you have to archive the file after integration ?

In case of crash will the abap program be able to restart the integration of the same file without creating duplicates ?

These are just exemples of questions you have to ask yourself before implementing a file interface.

You can see than most of them are not specific for SAP.

Regards,

Olivier

[GauthamV]

First check with your functional consultant what exactly is the transaction through which travel expenses data is updated.

For example if you go to transaction PR00 all travel expense related transactions are available.

once you know the transaction for which you need to upload the data then you can try the below options.

1) LSMW (mostly used by functional people to upload data)

2) BAPI ( check if any standard bapi is available for your requirement)

3) BDC (Do the recording for your required fields in that transaction and upload from flat file)

If you are getting data from the third party systems then you can consider RFC, ALE/IDOC options.