hi,

I am new to the SAP Business Connector, so have a few very basic questions.
I am using SAP BC 4.6 .
It would be nice if somebody could clarify them for me…

1 .What are the allowable Format s for the file s into Business Connector? Does the file format always have to be XML??? . I realize that the SAP BC can do some transformation of documents, so can it convert an IDOC into XML and Vice versa??
What would be the return type from the SAP to the SAP BC??
2.What can the Business Connector do for Publish/Subscribe methodology ?
I know that webMethods provides a broker server , where the documents could be published and the subscriber would receive the same. How do i acheive the same using BC??

thanks
pawan

Pawan,

Let me try to clarify but I do encourage you to look at the SAPBCSapAdapterGuide.pdf for an in-depth discussion of what BC can do.

As for the allowable formats, BC supports XML out of the box with no special handlers or extra coding. Technically, it can handle fixed length and delimited files as well, provided you know how to set it up. If you have access the the EDI documentation for IS/BC, you will discover how to build flows to handle fixed length and delimited files. BC, handles IDOCs out of the box and it is documented in the AdapterGuide mentioned above. After all it is an SAP product, so it should. As far as return types from SAP, much of the data handling and conversion to SAP data types are handled by the SAP adapter so you shouldn’t have to worry too muck about this. Check out Appendix C in the adapter guide to find out the cross-reference between SAP data types and BC types.

As far as Pub/Sub, I personally do not use this functionality and also have the impression that you will need additional software to accomplish this in BC.

Hope this helps. Good luck and welcome to WmUsers.

regards,

ajandja

I have also many questions about SAP BC.
I have installed the SAP BC Server on my platform, and the documentation SAP Adapter Guide describe settings (timeout,…).
But when I run SAP BC Server 4.6, I have no GUI.
In the directory bin, I have server.exe, runserver.bat,… but nothing about the interface writed in the documentation on page 4-2 (if you have )
Do you have a response for me ?

Antoine,

open an Internet explorer window and type url:

[url]http://localhost:5555/[/url]

Enjoy

1 .What are the allowable Format s for the file s into Business
Connector? Does the file format always have to be XML??? . I realize
that the SAP BC can do some transformation of documents, so can it
convert an IDOC into XML and Vice versa??
What would be the return type from the SAP to the SAP BC??

MZ- FlatFile or XML
It can transform IDOC vs XML, SAP return can be either IDOC or IData records.

2.What can the Business Connector do for Publish/Subscribe methodology
?
I know that webMethods provides a broker server , where the documents
could be published and the subscriber would receive the same. How do i
acheive the same using BC??
MZ- BC doesn’t have broker so it can’t do pub/sub. You can do remote server
call to achieve that.

I have a question along these same lines. I am going to be getting
a XML file from one of our partners into BC. In my flow how do
I send this XML file up to SAP. Is there a published routine that
I can invoke in my flow to send this data to SAP ? Any help with
this would be most appreciated.