ASP.NET and SAP integration

Question

Hai guys,

Has anyone had an experience integrating ASP.NET application with SAP? If yes, I would like to hear about those experiences.

Answer 1

Yes, I have been involved in a project in which a public facing asp.net website integrates with a SAP CRM and ECC back end. You can integrate in a couple of ways.

1. Using the SAP .NET Connector to call SAP RFCs or SOAP services. This is a SAP add on for Visual Studio 2003. Unfortunatlely it does not work with VS 2005 or 2008 and probably not 2010 and as far as i'm aware it is unlikely to ever do so. However there is a work around. You can use VS 2003 with the SAP .NET Connector to generate the proxy classes to interface this SAP and wrap these in a class library. The class library can then be referenced by any edition of Visual Studio.

2. Use the SAP Web Service tool to create web services which you can consume from your .NET project. SAP is leaning towards web services as the preferred method of integration. There is a SAP web service explorer add on for more recent version of Visual Studio which I believe allows you to browse and consume existing web services although I have no experience of using this as our version of SAP is not current enough.

Difficult aspects will be understanding enough of SAP's BOL (Business Object Layer) to create the services you need and transporting them between environments. Ideally you will need access to an analyst to at least help with this or have them create these for you. Another thing to look out for is the existence and version of certain System32 dlls. I think in particular the librfc32.dll, msvrp71.dll and msvcr71.dll.
Also permissions can be a bit of a pain with SAP along with generic unhelpful error messages.

Answer 2

A third option would be to use a 3rd party tool such as this one: http://www.aconcaguait.com/components.php to maintain the previous approach of integration, not using web services and compatible with previous (older) R/3 versions.

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

I'm not sure about final speeds of these approaches. Did anyone compare them with SAP Web Services?

Thanks,

Gil