SAP .NET connector or Web Services to connect .NET application?

[Former Member]

Copied over from ABAP, General

Hi Folks,

My first ever post on the forum, so please forgive me if I am going over very old ground for most of you.

For the last 7 years my company has maintained a series of interfaces between a .NET application and our SAP system using the SAP .NET Connector. Even though we have now moved to Visual Studio 2010 I still need to build our connection object - that makes RFC calls to a remote SAP client - in Visual Studio 2003.

Now, whilst this works well, I don't believe that it can be a sustainable solution.

I have looked at a number of sites on the subject and I have seen posts stating that it is recommended that .NET developers implement web services to connect to SAP.

On the other hand, I have noticed that there is a version 3 of the SAP .NET Connector.

My question is, therefore, which should we use?

Best Regards,

David Brower

Glasgow, Scotland

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I just wondered is it possible to create a SAP proxy in Visual Studio 2010 with the .NET Connector 3.0 just as it was possible in Visual Studio 2003?

Edited by: David Brower on Jul 5, 2011 3:13 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

Sorry for the delayed reply, the 'functionality' is still there but it works quite differently in NCo 3.0.

In NCo 3.0 there is no differentiation between design-time & runtime so you won't need to generate proxies anymore. Dynamic calls are introduced with NCo 3.0 therby loose coupling the SAP backend & Visual Studio (inherently that also means removing the Visual Studio dependance).

You should go through the documentation carefully (especially the overviews - it has major differences between the releases), there are some significant changes between NCo 2.0 and NCo 3.0:

[https://service.sap.com/connectors]

Regards, Trevor

[Former Member]

I just wondered is possible to create a SAP proxy in Visual Studio 2010 with the .NET Connector 3.0?

[Former Member]

Hi David,

I would say that it depends mostly from the culture of your .NET developpers. If they know SAP technology, RFC is very reliable and has better performance than Web Services.

SAP Web services are great when the team from the external system don't know SAP technology and don't want to learn the "complicated proprietary stuff".

Regards,

Olivier

[Former Member]

Many thanks for your response, Olivier. Will both technologies be supported for the foreseeable future?

[Former Member]

Hi David,

I would also think it depends on the functionality you're looking for. For example, there could be an SAP delivered Enterprise Service that meets a specific business requirement out-of-the-box, it might be easier to call the webservice from .NET instead of going the RFC/.NET Connector route.

Webservices are too widely used to go anywhere soon. The SAP .NET Connector wasn't released too long ago so that should still be around for a while (personally I think it will be a long while because there are lots of customers that still demand RFC communication capabilities between SAP & .NET).

Regards, Trevor

[Former Member]

Hi Trevor,

The document <a href="http://www.sdn.sap.comhttp://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/d0619693-ce8f-2c10-07b5-fc222ad36370?quicklink=index&overridelayout=true">sap GUIDELINES FOR BEST-BUILT APPLICATIONS THAT INTEGRATE WITH SAP BUSINESS SUITE</a> states that

SOA-NET-1. SAP recommends that .NET developers use the SAP

Enterprise Services Explorer tool for Microsoft .NET. SAP does not

recommend using .NET connector.

Certainly, because we have developed our interfaces using the original version of SAP .NET Connector it would make sense to move to version 3 of the .NET Connector. Especially if we all need to do is to install the latest version of the Connector and move our SAP proxy to the new version...

Yours,

David

[Former Member]

Hi David,

This just re-iterates what I've said above.

The statement you've highlighted below is in the context of SAP Enterprise Services, not RFC's. So SAP recommends using the Enterprise Service Explorer tool for .NET to SAP Webservice / Enterprise Service communication as a best practice. You would still need to manage your RFC historical communication & the Enterprise Service Explorer tool can't do that for you.

Also, please note, the Enterprise Service Explorer tool is only a mechanism relevant for design-time activities. It gives you a view (or metadata if you like) of the Enterprise Services available on SAP for consumption. This would allow you to generate your .NET proxies using this metadata from an Eclipse based IDE (in this case NWDS). You would then call the webservice endpoint at runtime from .NET.

The point I'm trying to make it that the ES Explorer tool is helpful at design-time for SAP webservices / Enterprise Services) while the SAP.NET Connector also works for runtime RFC communication. You can use them together for both webservice & RFC communication.

Regards, Trevor