How to exchange data between ABAP and external program

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I want to call an external program out of an ABAP program. I want to pass an internal table or a string (ABAP type STRING) to the external program and I want to get back an internal table or a string that the external program has modified or converted.

I don't know at the moment what kind of external program it is, not to mention in which programming language it is written. I hope this doesn't matter.

What solutions are there? It should be a very flexible solution (i.e. platform independant)?

Regards

Frank

[Former Member]

Hi.

Depending what you want to do with this external program and the language it is written, i think you must to read information in this links:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/developerareas/netweaver.sdn?page=Getting_Start_ICC.htm

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_46c/helpdata/es/72/90fd343603c95ee10000009b38f844/frameset.htm

It's not easy to say "i'll make an external SAP program and call it from my abap program exporting this data and importing this other". You must to follow some technical steps and standars rules.

hope it'll help you.

[Former Member]

Thank you for the SDN link. I found there the XDC (external document converter) interface. There is function module RSPO_CONVERT_PCDOC described which should convert a PC document via DCI interface.

I don't know what a DCI interface is. Does anybody knows it? Is there some documentation?

In function module RSPO_CONVERT_PCDOC a external RFC is called:

...

• do RFC call

CALL FUNCTION 'DOCCNV_CONVERT_DOCUMENT'

destination doccnv_rfcdest1

TABLES

CNVPARAMS = cnvparams

DOCSDATA = printdata

CNVRESULT = cnvresult

exceptions

system_failure = 1 message statusmessage

communication_failure = 2 message statusmessage.

...

I think this is the call of the DCI interface. But how has the called program to look like? And how have the needed RFC destinations to look like?

I know a lot of questions. But I need detail information at this level.