Ten concepts of interface and integration in SAP-from evolution point of view

The journey began with the classical programming model. I enjoyed the freestyle programming. But as time passed, the business trends started changing and the market began to evolve with cloud and mobile applications significantly in the digital infrastructure. And now when the best-recognized practice for programming is the ABAP Programming Model for SAP Fiori, I look back and see a journey of evolution in several areas in SAP. And it is going to continue as the future programming model is already ready called the ABAP RESTful programming model. From an SAP traveler’s point of view, many tools arrived, several techniques were developed and new concepts emerged in the context of the interface, infrastructure, and integration in SAP. There are several blogs on each of these topics but they all are segregated and written from a purely technical point of view. The idea of this blog-post is to provide an insight from an SAP traveler’s point of view so that it becomes easy to understand even for beginners. Hence without giving much technical info let me share a glimpse of concepts in sequence.

RFC Gateway security, part 1 – basic understanding

Basic understanding

In the following i will do the question and answer game to develop a basic understanding of the RFC Gateway, the RFC Gateway security and its related terms.

What is the RFC Gateway?

The RFC Gateway can be seen as a communication middleware. The RFC Gateway act as an RFC Server which enables RFC function modules to be used by RFC clients. It also enables communication between work or server processes of SAP NetWeaver AS and external programs.

From a technical perspective the RFC Gateway is a SAP kernel process running on OS level as user <SAPSID>adm.

Complete process to create Change Document in ABAP and SAPUI5

Requirement:

To show the record of changes in ‘city’ and ‘name’ defined as fields in customer-specific table using SAP Fiori app.

Solution:

Create Change Document Object for the respective table.

Implementation:

Step by step procedure to implement the solution.

Printing Slowness

Have you come across complaints from business users that the outputs take a long time for printing?

We had this issue of printing slowness.

Issue

When a customer came into the shop, bought some product, and made the payment, the employee would run our custom transaction which would trigger a smartform and a Payment receipt would be generated.

There were many such shops. Some of the shops reported that there were times when the customer had to wait for about 1-2 minutes before the receipt was printed. There were times when the receipt was generated within 10-15 seconds.

My experience during a SAP technical upgrade (Pre-implementation & Post-Implementation)

A typical SAP upgrade project would require technical as well as functional adjustments/modifications, which any implementation team would need to follow. The following blog discusses mainly on few technical aspects, a technical consultant (Mainly an ABAP consultant) would need to follow, which are based on experience on multiple system upgrades that I was involved in.

This blog covers from the pre-implementation phase, to the post-implementation phase, where it also contains information with regards to the SPDD/SPAU corrections and modifications.

PPM Financial Planning – Update FIN_PLAN Values using API: How-to guide

My project had a requirement to add up actual values(actual and actual-manual) and copy to forecast values in the Financial Planning of the PPM Module. Even though this sounds very simple, anyone who knows PPM tables knows that it is more than what meets the eye.

Printing to ABAP Console

Introduction to the ABAP Console

Perhaps you may be unfamiliar with this, but newer ABAP versions (7.52+) have the interface if_oo_adt_classrun, which allows printing to a console. This is an alternative to using WRITE statements or the cl_demo_output class. And this alternative is, IMO, a very welcome thing since pretty much all non-ABAP developers are using console printing one way or another.

Implementing this interface does more than that. It turns a class into an executable state by forcing you to implement a main method – as you would do in Java, for example. And, thanks to this, it completely bypasses the need for starting an SAP GUI everytime you want to run something – which is another great thing. To execute, you press F9 and the class starts running through its main method.

Simple isn’t easy – ABAP composition (Chunk it up)

Do your write code only for machines, or also for your fellow developers and curious functional consultants?

There are many ways to make the ABAP code clean, readable, maintainable and awesome, and it’s not a 1-fit-for-all. Two of the concepts to use is object composition and modular programming. Although they are basically two different things, they overlap in this context and I will mix them together here a bit. I tried to be brief, but this is the shortest I managed to get it now…