SAP is and remains a tremendously popular ERP application. As integration specialists, we are all confronted one day with the integration of SAP. SAP has quite some history and one of the mechanisms it supports for integration are the so called IDocs.
As an integration engineer, you must feel comfortable in an SAP world. And know your SAP transactions (programs) to develop, test, debug and support the information exchanges to and from SAP ERP systems.
This blog will briefly show you how to do this!
Login and menu
Via the SAP Logon Pad log in to the desired system.
With the search bar you can go directly to different menus.
The only 2 important menus when sending or receiving IDocs are:
- We02 (to view IDoc)
- We19 (to send IDoc)
Viewing IDocs (in SAP)
Once you think your IDoc has been successfully delivered in SAP you can verify this using following steps.
Use the “IDoc list” menu (we02 shortcut). “Direction” should be “2”. This is for inbound IDocs. Then press the execute button (F5) indicated with the red square on below screenshot.
In the window that appears you will be able to see all the inbound IDocs within the selected date range.
Sending IDoc from SAP to external program
Sending an IDOC from SAP to an external program you can use “Test tool for IDoc processing” menu (we19 shortcut). Actually what we do is re-sending an already existing IDoc again.
More advanced option is to generate a completely new IDoc by first making some changes to business data and generating a new IDoc. But let’s stick to the basic re-sending of an already existing IDoc.
Search for an existing IDOC. To do that press the button indicated in red in the picture below.
On the next window you can enter a date range, time range, very many other parameters. Most importantly is the IDoc name, also called ‘Logical Message Type’ (wildcard can be used).
After every desired parameter is filled in, press the execute button(F5) indicated with a red square in the next picture.
You will then receive a screen with all the IDocs found. Select one.
The ‘existing IDoc’ field that we saw in the first screen will now be filled in with an IDoc number. Press the ‘v clock button’ again. You will receive a new menu. Here press ‘standard outbound processing’ to send the IDoc. Select the amount of IDocs you want to send and continue.
And if everything goes well, the outbound IDoc pops up on my Integration Platform. IDocs are typically transported over the RFC protocol. On the Integration Platform we use the SAP JCo libraries to implement/support the (old) RFC protocol.
Author: Dries De Jonghe 
