Interface between GX and SAP made easy using Web Services

"Since this type of integration is so natural as far as GeneXus is concerned, it opens the door to a range of programming possibilities that allow us to use GeneXus when appropriate, " said Ricardo Schaich, Conaprole's Development Chief.
The cooperative's sales planning system (SPV v3.0) is one of the systems developed with GeneXus -due to its versatility, lower developing time, and the possibility it offers of working with state-of-the-art technology at a lower cost. This system is in communication with the SAP R/3 system through XML in a totally clear and automatic fashion.

The system -developed with GeneXus 7.5 in Visual Basic C/S with MSQLS- requires client, materials, and sales price information residing in the ERP (SAP), and in turn retrieves the result of sales planning to SAP, which then incorporates it to its MRP and Datawarehouse.

In order to establish communication between GeneXus and SAP, the BAPI's (Business Application Programming Interfaces) technology is used. RFC functions (remote function call) and the SAP Business Connector software can also be used, as well as Microsoft's Biz Talk. This software receives the requirements from the GeneXus-developed system (be it a data request to SAP or a data delivery to SAP) and unleashes the remote function, which will obtain the data from SAP or will process the data that have been received.

Luis Murillo from ARTech commented that, "in cases in which the required function cannot be worked out by using an SAP standard BAPI, either a BAPI or an RFC function in Abap4  (SAP language) must be developed in an R/3 environment.