Lpadding zeroes to a string in message mapping- material/customer format

Hi

I have a scenario which I guess - all of you would have faced if you calling a SAP std BAPI/RFC through XI from an external client application to read some information based on SAP material/customer

Normally, to get details of a material by calling a relevant RFC in SAP - for eg : if the material number contains only numbers ( no alpha ), then , when calling the RFC , the material string has to be lpadded with zeroes for the remaining lenght upto 18. This lpadding need not be done in case the material string contains an alpha character.

I tried lpadding the remaining length -say for the material using number format function in XI message mapping- but obviously this fails if the material string contains an alpha character....

Obviously , there has to be a check - whether the material string passed from the client application contains an alpha or not. If there is an alpha character , there is no need to lpad, otherwise there is a lpadding necessary.

1. Can this check for presence of an alpha character be done using the graphical editor and pre-defined functions ? Or do we have to write a advanced function using Java to do this ?

2. Can the whole logic of mapping the material number to the format required by the RFC be done using the graphical editor with the pre-defined functions

Can anybody share the advanced function code or some technicalities in the graphical mapping to achieve the whole mapping or atleast the check for the alpha character ?

Thank you in advance for your time.