BEA manual How the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP Works

1 Introducing the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP

How the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP Works

The paradigm that the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP uses includes application views, event adapters, and services adapters. An application view is a standard self-describing interface to an application. The BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP services are exposed in WebLogic Integration Studio using design elements, or plug-ins, known as nodes. These include Task nodes, which specify the operations to be performed by a BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP, and Event nodes, which set the business processes that occur when a specific event is “pushed” from the adapter.

For outbound processing, the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP is invoked from the Action node and will, in turn, perform a transaction against SAP using the IFR XML, BAPI, RFC, or IDoc interfaces. For inbound processing, the adapter converts the specific SAP event into an XML document that triggers the start of a business process.

The BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP interfaces are exposed as application views, providing the XSD XML schemas for event, request, and response document schemas that are imported into the WebLogic Integration repository. Once WebLogic Integration knows of these documents, they can be used in WebLogic Integration Studio and other WebLogic Integration tools. In addition, since application views are supported by the WebLogic Server strategy, the same BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP can be leveraged by other WebLogic Server JCA-based applications to increase ROI.

The BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP enables users to execute SAP IFR XML, IDocs, BAPI calls, and custom RFCs from WebLogic Integration as application views. To do this, the user creates the event, request, and response XML document schemas using BEA Application Explorer, which is implemented as a stand-alone Java Swing GUI. This GUI exposes all the components of your SAP system and enables you to select the ones for which you want to create an application view. By connecting the BEA Application Explorer to your SAP system, you can ensure that all the necessary communication and security information is gathered using SAP calls, and then stored in a WebLogic Integration Connection Factory database, to be used at execution time by the BEA WebLogic Adapter for SAP. This allows the application views to separate the business logic—contained in the XML event, request, and response documents—

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