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Business object structure for a simple BAPI

A business object for a simple BAPI call reflects a BAPI method or function call in SAP. Each business object property maps to a BAPI parameter. The metadata of each business-object property indicates the corresponding BAPI parameter. The operation metadata determines the correct BAPI to call.

For a simple BAPI that performs Create, Update, Retrieve, and Delete operations, each operation is represented by a business object, with the business objects being grouped together within a wrapper.

The business object wrapper can be associated with multiple operations, but for a simple BAPI, each business object is associated with only one operation.

For example, while a wrapper business object can contain BAPIs for Create and Delete operations, BAPI_CUSTOMER_CREATE is associated with the Create operation, not the Delete operation.

The BAPI business objects are children of the business object wrapper, and, depending on the operation to be performed, only one child object in this wrapper needs to be populated at run time in order to process the simple BAPI call. Only one BAPI, the one that is associated with the operation to be performed, is called at a time.

An example of a BAPI business object wrapper is shown in the following figure. The wrapper contains a BAPI business object.

Figure 1. Example of a BAPI wrapper business object

If you selected Asynchronous Transactional RFC (for outbound or inbound processing) or Asynchronous Queued RFC (for outbound processing),the BAPI wrapper business object also contains a transaction ID. The transaction ID is used to resend the BAPI call if the receiving system is not available at the time of the initial call.

Figure 2. Example of a BAPI wrapper business object with a transaction ID

The following figure shows an example of the BAPI business object. This object represents the CustomerGetList BAPI.

Figure 3. Example of a simple BAPI business object

This object, which contains the results of the BAPI operation, is named according to the convention Sap + Name of the structure. For more information on naming conventions, refer to Naming conventions for BAPI business objects.

If you select the Generate business objects in SAP PI standard option in the Specify the Discovery Properties window, the table type element will have a wrapper anonymous complex type, whose name is appended with a suffix “_Item”.

Additional information about the business object can be found in the application-specific information of the business object.

For example, the application-specific information for a top-level object lists the type of BAPI and operation information.

Figure 4. Application-specific information for a top-level object

Business objects for BAPI can also be generated without a wrapper. This is the recommended approach. If you are generating business objects without a wrapper, the execute operation is associated with each of the selected BAPIs by default. In the case of Asynchronous Transactional RFC or Asynchronous Queued RFC the transaction ID property is present in the top-level business object.

The BAPI interfaces


Related tasks:

Selecting business objects and services for BAPI outbound processing

Selecting business objects and services for BAPI inbound processing


Related reference:

BAPI business object application-specific information

Supported data operations on BAPI business objects

Naming conventions for BAPI business objects