General Questions about RFC SDK (NWRFCSDK) strategy and deployment

[chrisp_vigelius]

hello,

the new RFC SDK (<a href="https://websmp207.sap-ag.de/~form/sapnet?_SHORTKEY=01100035870000701311&">Netweaver RFC SDK</a>) is available for quite some time now. And <a href="https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1005832">Note 1005832</a> explicitely states: "The well-known "classic" RFC Libraries for non Unicode and Unicode shall be replaced by the SAP NetWeaver RFC Library."

However, this leaves some important questions unanswered:

a.) "shall be replaced" is a little bit vague. Are there any official statements about whether and when this will happen?

b.) GUI support: Currently there is no support for visual rfc in NWRFCSDK. However, there are quite some applications which rely on that (including mine). Is it planned to add visual RFC capabilities in the future? If not, how is one supposed to do visual rfc once the old SDK is being phased out?

c.) Deployment: NWRFCSDK (when used on Windows) requires several DLLs (sapnwrfc.dll, libsapucum.dll, ...) to be present at runtime. However, there is no installer for these, so how are they supposed to get onto the customers systems? Should they be redistributed by the application using it, like the MSVC runtime (it is mentioned nowhere that it is allowed to redistribute them, so I suppose it is not allowed)? Or will there be an installer in the future? Surely there must be some better way than saying "download this SDK and copy the DLLs to windows\system32" (just try to imagine what a seasoned Windows admin would tell you in response to such a request...).

It is really not easy to think about migration strategies without answers to these questions, so any hints would be deeply appreciated...

[Boris_Rubarth]

Hi Chris,

this is indeed a difficult area. AFAIK there is no official statement, and my few cents are therefore just a private guess without any warranty - and probably no benefit for you.

a) replacement of classic rfc libs

Depends on the maintenance of a product based on this, so probably still many years of existence.

b) "visual rfc"

This is nothing officially supported or wanted, probably no further support.

c) Deployment:

Agree: not very comfortable, although the path does not necessarily have to be system32.

Regards, Boris