SAP .NET Connector IDOC receiver/sender

[Former Member]

We are currently trying to create a middleware application to link a SAP system to a non-SAP system. We were thinking of using the IDoc Connector for XML in order to send/receive XML formatted IDocs to and from the SAP system. Unfortunately it has come to our attention that you cant use this component without using the SAP DCOM connector (for authentication), which we are trying to avoid as its support is being discontinued. We would like to use the .NET Connector but are wondering if this connector supports XML transport of IDOC's (send/receive)?? If not does it allow for support of the IDoc Connector for XML control... IE will it authenticate for that component? If the .NET connector doesn't support XML transport of IDOC's does anyone know how IDOC's are handled within this environment... do they come out as straight text... that we will parse... or some other object???

Any information you can supply in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the help

Dave

[reiner_hille-doering]

Hello Dave,

the .NET Connector currently has a feature that supports uploading and downloading of Text-based IDocs. We are planing to extend the IDoc support in the following ways:

- WebAS 6.20 and higher can support HTTP uploads and dowloads of XML idocs directly. To use them from .NET you don't need additional software. Just grap the XML schema of your IDOC (e.g. from ifr.sap.com) and use Microsoft's tool XSD.EXE to generate classes for the IDOC. Then you use XmlSerializer to read or write your classes from/to SAP server.

-For older SAP servers we are currently implementing an "IDocSerializer" class that does the same reading and writing of your classes, but to the "text" idoc format. This serialized data can be written to or read using the existing IDocSender/IDocReceiver classes.

- Both together allow you to do conversion between text idocs and XML idocs in .NET.

Hope this information helps you.

Reiner.

[Former Member]

Thanks Reiner...

I appreciate the quick response. Any chance I could get an estimated time of arrival for the IDocSerializer class?? Is it coming soon... or will I have a long wait.

Dave

[reiner_hille-doering]

Difficult to say. I'll try to make it as product within this year, but maybe also later.

If it's ugent to you, you could also implement such a feature on your own. Here the key how to do it:

- You need to write a tool like MS' s XSD.EXE that ready the schema and creates classes from it. In addition to what the tool does, you need to store the lenghs information as a custom attributes in the generated classes. The whole thing sound more complicated as it is, as all needed classes are available in .NET framework, namespace System.Xml.Schema.

- You need the real serializer class that reads/writes all fiels by reflection and uses the lenght attributes to put everything in a string with correct offsets.

Shouldn't be too complicated, but might need some time. This is excactly what we are going to implement.

Regards,

Reiner.

[Former Member]

Hi,

We are facing the same problem while converting a C++ application (based on IDocLib) to .NET.

We need to convert a Text IDOC into a serialized .NET class, but do not know how to extract information from the text stream.

Is there a documentation on the structure of a Text IDOC ?

I know that you can download the structure of an IDOC type from R/3, but I do not know how to use it to parse the text stream.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Jacopo

[reiner_hille-doering]

As I wrote before, there will be a .NET connector feature to parse/generate text based IDOCs in a strongly typed fashion in a future version. Don't ask me when this version will be available.

If you need this feature now, you need the structure of the IDOC with all it's length and offset information, e.g. from the schema files on http://ifr.sap.com.

If you need a generic tool to create /send/receive IDOCs, you can use XI server or SAP Bussiness Connector.

Reiner.