BSI 10.0 and Unicode

[philip_seman]

I find it hard to believe that BSI does NOT support unicode? Are they looking to put them out of business with SAP as all installations are now unicode only?

We went through a conversion for our database from non-unicode to unicode, and cannot get this working now for the RPUBTCU0 program.

Has anyone done this and got BSI working again? We did an export/import of the BSI schema/tables and get the tomcat website working, but have an error as it doesn't think a license is installed when testing the payroll tax program, when a valid one displays on the tf10lic -v command.

[philip_seman]

We have always run the BSI database schema within the SAP ECC database, as that is how it was originally setup back with version 6 I think, and we never ran into an issue.

We managed to get around this by copying the tables/schema/data from the non-unicode database over to the unicode database, as SAP doesn't handle that schema on the conversion, and making sure the permissions were set correctly.

I couldn't get a straight answer from BSI on how to "properly" set this up, as to whether it should be on its own database or integrated with the ECC system.

Maybe on the next version, I'll convert it to be on its own.

[Matt_Fraser]

Hi Philip,

BSI has always maintained that they support TaxFactory either way, i.e. as a separate schema within the SAP database, or on its own. I myself maintain that it's a best practice to use a separate server (a smallish VM instance is typically enough, so it doesn't have to be big). Doing so saves a lot of headaches. Yes, it's another server, but it's far less complicated when it's isolated from changes you make to either one.

So does this mean your BSI system and connection are working now?

Cheers,
Matt

[Matt_Fraser]

Hi Philip,

BSI TaxFactory absolutely works fine with a Unicode ECC system. We converted our ECC system to Unicode about a year ago, and there are no problems. I should point out that we do not run TaxFactory in the same database or even on the same server as ECC -- I strongly recommend against that practice. Give BSI its own server.

What DBMS do you use for BSI? We're using SQL Server, and we installed it with the SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS collation. This is how we initially installed BSI.

Then, for the conversion, in the RFC Destination BSI10-US-TAX we have the target system communication type set to Unicode, with Character Conversion at Default Setting. That's really all we had to do.

Cheers,
Matt

[former_member63719]

Hello Philip and Matt, we, too have converted to Unicode and HANA. I am also having problems testing from

RPUBTCU0 and am running tfserverdebug and getting an error. We are planning to have our BSI database on HANA. Has anyone successfully done that? Would you share your setup instructions, particularly how tfserver.bat is set? Thank yoU!

[Matt_Fraser]

Hi Jean,

I documented everything about how to setup a standalone TaxFactory system in a 4-part series of blogs that begins with https://blogs.sap.com/2014/10/08/bsi-taxfactory-10-installationupgrade-tips-tricks/. That was a bit over two years ago, so a few things have changed, of course, but overall it's much the same.

The biggest change in the past year is the introduction of the "New RFC Wrapper" and desupport for "Classic RFC." It's possible, if you are just now getting up-to-date with Cyclic updates, that you're now running into this. I documented everything you need to do for that at https://blogs.sap.com/2016/01/21/bsi-taxfactory-cyclic-j-and-the-new-rfc-wrapper/.

Just for completeness, though I don't think this is related to your or Philip's issue, I also documented the process of applying a Cyclic update at https://blogs.sap.com/2015/03/06/bsi-taxfactory-10-cyclic-update/, and how to set up payroll tax synchronization at https://blogs.sap.com/2015/03/13/synchronize-payroll-tax-data/.

My tfserver.bat has the following lines (TF10 password blanked out for security):

set TF10_CONNECT_STRING=DSN=TFD;UID=TF10;PWD=***
set TF10_SCHEMA_NAME=TF10.TF10
REM for SAP trace debugging, uncomment below & see file errors.txt in gateway working directory
REM E:\BSI\TaxFactory\server\tf10serverdebug.exe %*
REM else for usual operation
E:\BSI\TaxFactory\server\tf10server.exe %*

You need all the NWRFC dlls in the same folder with tf10server.exe now, as well. Those are not supplied by BSI, you have to download them from SAP. I detail this in the blog about the New RFC Wrapper.

Cheers,
Matt

[former_member63719]

Thanks, Matt. I found your 4 part series - well done! My tfserver.bat looks like yours for using a SQL database. My challenge now is to be able to use a HANA database. My error says -

Unable to start the server: RFC_INVALID_PARAMETER - Parameter ASHOST, GWHOST or MSHOST is missing.

[Matt_Fraser]

As we don't have HANA, I can't speak to that, and I don't know how many BSI customers are using HANA, if any, though I do know that BSI now supports HANA, so it should work.

With regard to the RFC_INVALID_PARAMETER error, do you mean you get this error when testing with RPUBTCU0? If so, I would double-check that your RFC Destination for BSI10-US-TAX is setup correctly. Here is what mine looks like:

The key here is the Target Host and Gateway Host should be your BSI server, and the Program path is the absolute path on the target host. Also, make sure "sapgw00" is defined in your services file on both your BSI and SAP servers (assuming you use system 00 for the RFC Gateway on your BSI system); this should be the case by default after installing the Gateway.

[former_member63719]

Matt,

I get the RFC error when I execute tf10server.bat and have it execute tf10serverdebug.exe. When I run RPUBTCU0 it raises a system failure condition in SAPLPBSU when it calls function PAYROLL_TAX_CALC_US_10.

[Matt_Fraser]

tf10serverdebug.exe should produce a file called "errors.txt" in the gateway working directory on your BSI server, probably \saploc\<SID>\G00\work. In that file you should see clues about why it's failing. Most likely it will be something like "connect to datasource failed," which would make sense since you're in the middle of trying to setup a new HANA database for BSI, and "system failure" in RPUBTCU0 is usually related to data source (or dataset) connection errors (per the master BSI troubleshooting Note, 1910127).

[former_member63719]

All, in the end the "Unable to start the server: RFC_INVALID_PARAMETER - Parameter ASHOST, GWHOST or MSHOST is missing." , message was irrelevant. The real issue was that we had indicated the application userid and password in the tfserver.bat file and that was working, for whatever reason, when connecting to the SQL Server TF10 database. That needed to changed to the HANA database userid and password.

[senthilsap]

Jean E Lovitt,

We are also getting the same error after executing the tf10server.bat file which says at thebegining

15 - installing function RFC_PAY.

15.. Installingfuncction RFC_HRUS..

15 Unable to start the server: RFC_INVALID_PARAMETER - ParameterASHOST,GWHOST,MSHOST or SERVER_PORT ismisssing.

Were u able to fix it? any suggestion helps