Connect 3rd party system to SAP ERP using webservices via SAP PI

[alejiandro_sensejl]

Hello PI experts!

We have developed a service management solution together with one of our partners to integrate their external portal (JBOSS server) into SAP ERP using web service technology:

3rd party system (web service) <--- HTTP(S) ---> (web service) SAP ERP

The web service consumer and provider were created in SAP ERP within our own partner namespace (/namespace/).

Now one of our customer wants to use their SAP PI as a middleware:

3rd party system (web service) <-- HTTP(S) --> SAP PI <-- HTTP(S) ---> (web service ) SAP ERP

If possible, we’d like to provide all functionality in SAP ERP within our own namespace (while using our own internal development system which isn't connected to any SAP PI) which means there should be no development required on customer system landscape. All components of SAP ERP should be deployed using transport requests. This requires that SAP PI should just act as proxy and forward the service calls between 3rd party portal and SAP ERP.

Is this possible? I’ve read about (sender / receive) SOAP adapter on help.sap.com. Is this the correct SAP PI use case for zero development on SAP ERP?

Thanks in advance and best regards

Alej

[baskar_gopalakrishnan2 · Accepted solution]

Let me add few more points... Actually you introduce PI middleware as a just mediator between third party and ERP system.  Since you are going to use soap as sender and soap as receiver adapter too, that means you get the wsdl from soamanager and use the message structure for both sender and receiver the same. If you use the same message structure for both inbound and outbound interface, you don't need any complex mapping at all. you just need one to one simple mapping for each element in the payload.

Advantages here are

a) you get monitoring capability now using pi middleware.

b) since you use soap adapter you just need business component not business system. That means you don't need to config anything on the sender and target systems .

[Harish]

Hi Alej,

SAP PI can invoke the webservice which you are already using from the connection to the third party and SOAP adapter needs to use in this case.

there would be no addition development required on ERP side but you need to addition configuration for the connectivity to SAP PI.

hope this will help.

Regards,

Harish

[alejiandro_sensejl]

Hi Harish, and of course other PI experts!

Thanks for your quick response! Since we have the first phone conference with our customers’ PI team from India I am still researching on this topic and I have some further questions.

- What additional configuration is required? At SAP PI or SAP ERP side (For clarification, the required communication is bi-directional and at SAP ERP side we have used SOAMANAGER for configuration.)? Do you mean this?

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73ehp1/helpdata/en/69/a6fb3fea9df028e10000000a1550b0/content.htm?frame...

- For mapping at PI system there is often very extensive documentation required (I have found some large excel samples for IDOC to XML use case with up to 400 fields and 40 columns). Do we have to provide this also for our scenario or can we just send the WSDLs from both systems (3rd party / SAP ERP) and the PI adapter is generated from it?

Again, thanks in advance!

Best regards

Alej

[Harish]

Hi Alej,

Your requirment is just to add SAP PI in middle, so that you can call webservice via PI. you do not need any message mapping as there is no transformation. you need to configure the SOAP adapter (as mention in the link).

So as you do not need transformation (message mapping), you do not required to create mapping document.

Hope this will helpful.

Regards,

Harish

[Shabarish_Nair]

For PI to call the WS, all you need is to provide the WSDL and the URL that needs to be invoked with the required access. Now since this is a customer calling you, i assume it might be from an external n/w. So PI needs to be able to connect to this WS thus the required network connections need to be sorted (port opening, reverse proxy config if any etc)

Regarding transformation, since this seems to be like a pass through scenario, you might still get away by not detailing it in a mapping sheet (but is a good practice to do so)

[alejiandro_sensejl]

Hi Shabarish,

thanks for mentioning your concerns.

May I ask you to provide some best practise template for documentation of this scenario?

Unfortunately I failed to find something appropriate on both SCN and Google...

Thanks a lot!

Best regards

Alej