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Need best practice recommendation for PI SFDC integration

Former Member
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Experts,

Need feedback on the following. Using PI version 7.1 (no custom adapters or middleware involved)

1) Sending sales order information from SAP to SFDC real time. Is it recommended to use synchronous or asynchronous call? What is recommended best practice? What API to use and why(SOAP, REST , BULK etc). Currently using asynchronous call. All orders not reaching SFDC and some are being lost due to networking issues how to track them.  If using synchronous worried about time out and queuing issues. So what is the approach most people have used and has it worked for them? Please share your ideas and details

2) Error handling and alert monitoring in PI. How difficult or complicated is it to configure email alerts to outlook inbox if certain messages fail or are successful or stuck in queue? Can this be done in PI

3) Is it possible to get response back from SFDC whether certain record was successfully updated in SFDC or not when sent from SAP

Thank you

Tony

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

iaki_vila
Active Contributor
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Hi Toni,

You can find some documents about PI ans Salesforce integration: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/50a76cfa-4966-2d10-aba7-da496d9b5...


2) Error handling and alert monitoring in PI. How difficult or complicated is it to configure email alerts to outlook inbox if certain messages fail or are successful or stuck in queue? Can this be done in PI

There is not so difficult to set alert configuration

However if you want to send the payload or any particularity, those alerts can be more difficult.

Regards.

Answers (3)

Answers (3)

benoy111
Discoverer
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Hi Team,

We want to send Order with line items to Salesforce through Advantco Adapter,could anyone guide with the structure

Former Member
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Communications with Salesforce is not easy to say the least (at least not in my experience).  We had custom build processes that utilized the SOAP API only.  The other APIs would have been further custom code.  The actual SOAP communications was done with several java maps to get Login credentials before sending the actual data (this was all built before I started PI work).  There were probably easier ways to do it.


You can do synchronous calls with Salesforce and it will return a XML structure with information about the transaction (successful, error, etc...).  You really have to limit the size of each transaction to stay within a 5 minute timeframe (as long as your SAP PI system is set for a 5 minute time-out).  We had to have basis change that.

Our company actually ditched all that custom code for an adapter that automatically adjusts between the SOAP and BULK APIs.

Former Member
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Thanks for your feedback everyone

Would you mind sharing the adapter name ? and if it is required on SAP side or Sales force side?

And if I implement 5 min time out would that fix the time out issue in case of synchronous calls. Just want to make sure that orders don't start failing because of large header and item volume in case of synchronous calls? Also do you know if sales force accepts sales order structure as one or it wants two separate messages for header and line item from SAP?

Former Member
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Sorry for the delay in replying - I was on vacation.

The name of the adapter is Advantco SFDC Adapter for SAP NetWeaver® PI by Advantco (http://advantco.com).  The adapter is installed on to SAP PI. Advantco usually will allow a trial period of their adapters which might be a great way to test/validate what you want to do will actually work.

The 5 minute timeout is a buffer.  I could never guarantee a 100% successful synchronous call - sorry.  In my experience, we send 999 records for BULK API upserts to large tables within 2 minutes.

Former Member
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Thanks. Are your BULK API upserts synchronous? just wondering. Also if you are sending sales orders do you break them in multiple messages for better efficiency perhaps header and line item? I am assuming with your adapter you still have to get some APEX coding done on SFDC side?

Former Member
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Yes, we do BULK API upserts but we limit the data from SAP to 999 per batch (technically you can do 5000 records per BULK API batch) but we do worry about timeouts ourselves.

We currently do not send line items with the orders (only header information) and I would expect that we would have them broken up into individual Header/Line items transaction batches (send all the headers first, then send all the line items).

We currently are doing no APEX coding.

I would talk to Advantco (or any SFDC adapter for SAP) about what you would like to do and have them do a prototype of it (or maybe they will give you a trial for you to proto-type it).  What you are needing for an adapter is similar to our needs but not exactly so the Advantco adapter might not be a good fit for your organization.

Former Member
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anyone?