Soap Message Vs Webservice in XI

[Former Member]

We have a scenario where a Legacy/External system can send a SOAP message and request for vendor details via XI from SAP system.

From XI to SAP, we can use Synchronous Proxy or even RFC to redirect the response back to external system.

I guess there are two ways of doing it, use SOAP Adapter and handle the incoming request. The inbound message interface can be defined by knowing the incoming SOAP request agreed with the External system.

Can't we expose the webservice on top of XI? (based on Inbound Message interface) and the external system sends the request to web service which in turn calls the sync proxy and gets the result from R/3 system and send the data back to external system.

Wanted to know if the second way is possible (to create a webservice). And which is the preferred way of doing it - Receiving SOAP request or creating Web service, even though in both cases SOAP adapter will be used.

BR / Swetank

[Former Member]

Swetank,

I would suggest you to get the data into XI with the help of SOAP adapter and map it to a RFC (if your requirements fit to standard) else to a zRFC and then get the response from RFC and send to the webservice. So make it as SOAP-XI-RFC synchrnous scenario.

Check this weblogs for some help on this scenario (but it is just exactly opposite to your scenario):

/people/shabarish.vijayakumar/blog/2006/03/23/rfc--xi--webservice--a-complete-walkthrough-part-1

/people/shabarish.vijayakumar/blog/2006/03/28/rfc--xi--webservice--a-complete-walkthrough-part-2

Regards,

---Satish