Adapter for non-SAP system

[Former Member]

Hi,

I have understood that an adapter is required to connect other applications using XI.

If for the respective application there is no adapter available one has to be developed.

The question is : How difficult it is ?

What are the prerequisites for developing such an adapter ?

Thank you,

Mihai

[Former Member]

Hi Mihai,

first could you describe a litle bit in detail which kind of protocol you want to use to connect to XI. At the moment there are these Adapter which you can use to connect legacy application to XI.

- File-Adapter

- HTTP-Adaper

- SOAP-Adapter

- JMS-Adapter

With one of these adapter it should be possilbe to connect to your Non-SAP application. Especially the File-Adapter is very universal. Just produce file with a certain structure and then your can immediate exchange this file with XI. Or like Harald mention you can use HTTP or JMS-Adapter. Then your application just only have to produces this message format. If you can use java then it is easy to produce SOAP-Message with Tool from Apache group.

I think it will not be easy to write an own adpater like one of the SAP-technical Adapter. Therefore there are compnay like iWay and Seeburger who are specialized to write adapter also for XI. My advise to you is to try to use existing adapter which come with XI.

regards,

Ly-Na Phu

[Former Member]

Hi Ly-Na,

I would like to talk SOAP to and from a 3rd party ERP to Business Connector and in the long run against XI. I already have written a SOAP wrapper over the top of the ERP, and successfully sent and received SOAP messages to systems such as SeeBeyond. Basically we use the Microsoft SOAP toolkit version 3.0 for our VB6 code and we use the .NET SOAP services for our .NET client. Has anybody had experice connecting the microsoft SOAP tools to Business Connector or XI?

Cheers

[Former Member]

Hi Matthew,

i don't have experience in connecting Microsoft SOAP to XI. But it should work because SOAP is standardizied. Just use the SOAP-Adapter from SAP and configure it properly.

regards,

Ly-Na Phu

[Former Member]

In XI 3.0, there is Adapter Development Kit (ADK). It will have guidelines on what an adapter should do and there are API's published there as well.

There is also a certification process with SAP if one wants them to be certified.

Regards

Sukumar.

[Former Member]

Mihai,

I'm not an expert on writing adapters. But I think a can simply talk to XI via the HTTP protocol.

You need to implement a HTTP listener to receive messages from XI. Posting messages to XI is even easier using HTTP.

If your application can produce files (xml/flat) or has JMS connectivity you don't even need to write a adapter just use the ones provided by SAP.

Check with youre application vendor to see if he has an adapter aviable.

Regards, Harald

Message was edited by: Harald Kastelijn