ASP.NET and SAP Integration

Question

Hi guys

Does anyone have experience integrating an ASP.NET application with SAP? If so, I would like to hear about this experience.

Answer 1

Yes, I participated in a project in which the asp.net publicity website integrates with SAP CRM and ECC. You can integrate in several ways.

• Use the SAP.NET Connector to invoke SAP RFC or SOAP services. This is an SAP add-on for Visual Studio 2003. Unfortunately, it does not work with VS 2005 or 2008, and probably not since 2010, and as far as I know, this is unlikely to ever happen. However, there is work. You can use VS 2003 with the SAP.NET connector to create proxy classes for interacting with this SAP and transferring them to the class library. Then the class library can be referenced in any edition of Visual Studio.

• Use the SAP Web Service tool to create web services that you can use in your .NET project. SAP is leaning toward web services as its preferred integration method. An SAP Web Services Explorer has been added for a later version of Visual Studio, which, in my opinion, allows you to view and use existing web services, although I have no experience using this because our version of SAP is not relevant enough.

Understanding SAP BOL (Business Object Layer) to create the necessary services and transfer them between environments will be challenging. Ideally, you will need access to an analyst to at least help with this or create them for you. Another thing to pay attention to is the existence and version of some System32 system libraries. I think in particular librfc32.dll, msvrp71.dll and msvcr71.dll.
In addition, permissions can be a bit sick with SAP along with general useless error messages.

Answer 2

A third option would be to use a third-party tool such as this one: http://www.aconcaguait.com/components.php to support the previous integration approach without using web services and compatible with previous versions of R / 3.

A version of Visual Studio 2010 seems to be available in the near future.

I am not sure about the final speeds of these approaches. Has anyone compared them to SAP Web Services?

Thanks,

Gilles

Answer 3

I largely agree with the solution provided by Andy Rose, I used the first approach using the Dot Net connector Theobold software . We made a Windows Dot Net service that used Dot Net to invoke SAP R3 functions. We are provided with various R3 functions for different integration points. In some functions we get data from SAP, while in some we transfer SAP transactions.

Thus, this is our network service, which acted as the interface between our network application and SAP.

A few years ago, when I was doing a case study for another SAP dot net integration project, I found that this was possible thanks to the web services that are provided by SAP, and that it was much simpler than using a point network connector.