IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Services and service-related functions > Access external services with adapters > Configure and using adapters > IBM WebSphere Adapters > SAP Software > SAP interfaces > ALE pass-through IDOC interface

Outbound processing for the ALE pass-through IDoc interface

The adapter supports outbound processing (from the adapter to the SAP server) for the ALE pass-through IDoc interface. ALE uses IDocs for data exchange, and the adapter uses business objects to represent the IDocs.

The following list describes the sequence of processing actions that result from an outbound request using ALE pass-through IDoc interface.

The client application that makes the request uses the interface information that was generated by the external service wizard.

1. The adapter receives a request, which includes a wrapper business object, from a client application.

   The wrapper business object contains a data stream representing the IDoc. No separate IDoc business object exists for pass-through IDocs

2. The adapter supports multiple IDocs in the data stream. The data stream content can be of two types:

   1. Inline format without a delimiter - as supported in previous versions. In the inline format, multiple IDocs are differentiated using the header EDIDC_40
   2. Delimited content format - supported in the current version. In the delimited format, you can post multiple IDocs to the SAP system by using a delimiter in between, to achieve the standard length of 1063 characters as specified by the SAP adapter. You can use delimiters to mark IDoc boundaries and also mark Control and Data Records boundaries within an IDoc.

      When you insert a delimiter between Data Records, the adapter can then identify each Data Record and pad them to meet SAP specifications. The different uses of the delimiter are as follows:

      • Single IDoc:

        Figure 1. Single IDoc

        

      • Single IDoc with '\n' character to separate data records

        Figure 2. Single IDoc with '\n' character to separate data records

        

      • Multiple IDocs

        Figure 3. Multiple IDocs

        

      • Multiple IDocs with the '\n' character separating the Data Records

        Figure 4. Multiple IDocs with the '\n' character separating the Data Records

        

3. The adapter uses the IDoc wrapper business object to populate the appropriate RFC-enabled function call used by the ALE interface.

4. The adapter establishes an RFC connection to the ALE interface and passes the IDoc data to the SAP system. If you are using the CWYAP_SAPAdapter_Tx.rar and have provided a Transaction ID, adapter uses it while posting the IDoc to SAP. If you have not provided a Transaction ID, the adapter will create one before posting. If you are using the qRFC protocol, the adapter passes the IDoc data in the order specified in the wrapper business object to the specified queue on the SAP server. The adapter uses the same Transaction ID for all the IDocs in the wrapper and posts all of them using one call.

5. After passing the data to SAP, the adapter performs one of the following steps:

   • If the call is not managed by a J2C local transaction, the adapter releases the connection to SAP and does not return any data to the caller. When no exceptions are raised, the outbound transaction is considered successful. You can verify whether the data is incorporated into the SAP application by inspecting the IDocs that have been generated in SAP.

   • If the call is managed by a J2C local transaction, the adapter returns the transaction ID.

     The adapter uses the tRFC protocol to support J2C local transactions.

Import the CWYAP_SAPAdapter_Tx.rar version of the adapter when you create a module that makes use of transactional (tRFC) or queued transactional (qRFC) processing.

The ALE pass-through IDoc interface