Skip to Content
0
Former Member
Nov 27, 2009 at 12:38 AM

Age old question - RFC call or VIA PI

110 Views

Dear All,

I am going to ask an age old question here again. Mainly for the reason that so much has changed in last few years with respect to integration technologies including XI/PI and when I started to look at the solution for a specific situation I could not easily arrive at the solution. Partly to blame my search query string which most of the time resulted into so many hits for blogs and forums that I could not figure out the answer straight ahead. And here I am asking it all over again if I can get the specific answer.

So let me describe the situation: As part of this big transformation program which has adopted ESOA framework there is a requirement to extract certain piece of information from one R/3 system and send it into another R/3 system. All at latest stable versions. Now without much guesses from your end let me tell you yes there is an integration layer present and it is SAP PI 7.1.

But the business requirement is pretty straight forward, extract the data from one R/3 and post it into another R/3 system, once successfully posted get the document number in the response to source system.

There are two possibilities: I use a direct RFC call to do this stuff or I can use PI as the mediation layer.

Let me tell you business is least bothered if the call fails in any of the systems involved since there is already a strong reconciliation business process in place which can provide the necessary information into the target system and would ensure that source system is updated with document number at a later point. So there is no requirement to monitor, reprocess and even to transform any of the data. Meaning more or less no one really is not looking for all the functionalities PI can offer. In the near future there is no other system which would want such a piece of information. So the reuse of same interface from PI to other systems also far fetched.

So to speak PI is just adding another point of failure whereas RFC can be straightforward call avoiding any development and later support efforts to monitor through PI.

So is it alright in this case to go for direct RFC call and make an exception to ESOA framework on the project?

Thank you in advance for your opinions.

Cheers!