Establish a connection with a PHP application

[Former Member]

Hello,

I would like to get some information about establishing a connection between an SAP system and a PHP application.

I’m developing a Web application for a company that uses SAP to manage their employees. What I want to do is to implement the possibility to use data from SAP in my web-app.

I’m new in SAP and I was wondering if there was some kind of web service or functionality that would be ​​available to retrieve information from SAP (typically about users).

Does anyone know a solution on how to achieve this?

Thank you, any comments on this topic would be welcome.

Have a nice day.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Michael,

yes, it is possible to use SAP data in your PHP web apps. There are a number of options depending on the state of your SAP systemä and it's operators' knowhow.

The current standard way to interact with your SAP system is to use Enterprise Services (enterprise grade web services) delivered by SAP. E.g. for HCM you have the following bundle HCM Master Data. If this is installed and activated on your SAP system, you just need the proper permissions from your SAP folks and then can easily use it in your PHP app. Usually those enterprise services are relatively well documented though they tend to be super blown up or overly complicated.

Another possibility is to team up with the SAP folks and create custom webservices. This is the most efficient solution if you do not have any basic principles for a service oriented architecture in place. A versed ABAP programmer would be able to rather quckly derive a suitable function module from standard and custom functionality and provide you with one or more custom webservices.

A more recent variant is to use REST services mediated by a component called Netweaver Gateway.

And finally an older version you may stumble upon occasionally in this forum is to use RFC enabled function modules using the RFC connector. Personally I think this solution is obsolet, since exposure of function modules as webservices is also easy and consumption of webservices pretty easy in PHP.

Hope it helps,

anton

[Former Member]

Thank you for your answers

I'm currently trying to install the Netweaver 7.02 Trial Edition and I think I will go through web services.

Have a nice day

Michaël

[humberto_amador]

Hello Michaël, check this thread it could be useful for you.