Consuming SAP XI Web Service With Microsoft Visual C%23 2008 Express Edition

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© 2009 SAP AG 1

Consuming SAP XI Web Service

with Microsoft Visual C# 2008

Express Edition

Applies to:

SAP NetWeaver 2004, SAP XI/PI, Microsoft Visual C # 2008 SP1 Express Editions, Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1

Summary

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to consume a web service created in the SAP eXchange Infrastructure (XI) using Visual Studio c# Express Edition, to help developers and analysts to leverage the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) through of the use of these technologies.

Author: Gilmar Luiz Puntel Júnior

Company: BRF Brasil Foods S.A.

Created on: 17 June 2010

Author Bio

Gilmar Luiz Puntel Júnior has 12 years of experience working with SAP system. 3 years as Support Analyst and 6 years working as Business Analyst at Brasil Foods S/A, in 3 projects of SAP R/3 implementation, as member of SD team. Education: Bachelor in System Information, Technical in Information Management, SD SAP Consultant Certified ECC 6.0 and ITIL® Foundation V2 Certified. The product of the last project used Sap Netweaver technologies, and this article is part of this project.

Consuming SAP XI Web Service with Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition


© 2010 SAP AG 2

Table of Contents

Understanding Web Services..................................................................................................................... 3

Business Scenario ..................................................................................................................................... 3

SAP R/3 Side ............................................................................................................................................ 4

SAP XI Side .............................................................................................................................................. 4

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition .................................................................................................. 4

Creating the Visual Part of the Application ................................................................................................. 5

1) Create New Project .................................................................................................................................................. 5

2) Rename Windows Form .......................................................................................................................................... 9

3) Creating labels to our parameters ............................................................................................................................ 9

4) Creating Text Box for our parameters: ................................................................................................................... 11

5) Creating a check-box to access through a proxy: .................................................................................................. 13

6) Creating button to call the Web Service: ................................................................................................................ 15

7) Grid to view the return of the web service: ............................................................................................................. 17

Creating the Coding of the Application ..................................................................................................... 20

1) Classes to consume the web service ..................................................................................................................... 20

2) Populate our web service request .......................................................................................................................... 21

3) Call web service ..................................................................................................................................................... 22

4) Populating the Data Grid View ............................................................................................................................... 23

5) DataGridView after execution ................................................................................................................................ 24

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 25

Related Content ...................................................................................................................................... 26



© 2010 SAP AG 3

Understanding Web Services

Web services, how the proper name says, are softwares available on internet, and used to execute a specific job. They execute a specific job, so they are called services. There are a lot of web services available at internet today, with the more variables objectives, from more simple logic to more complex: convert a temperature, get the conversion of a currency, create a purchasing order or control a warehouse for example.

This way, we have a side that are the consumer of a service and the provider of a service.

The objective of a web service, is to become available to other softwares your service, transforming the IT environment interoperable. To become this possible, web services have many rules (open standards), that are maintained by a consortium called W3C (www.w3c.org), that define these rules.

Here are the more important concepts behind a web service:

XML: eXtensible Markup Language. It’s important to observe that all information exchanged from consumer to provider or from provider to consumer are based on XML. XML documents are separated by tags, and is been used in almost all softwares that needs to exchange information thought enterprises.

WSDL: Web Service Description Language. This is a XML document that describes what will be sent to a provider, what will return like answer and how this service can be accessed.

SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol. It´s a communication protocol written in XML that is conventioned in all web service structure. A SOAP message is sent to a provider, and this provider return a SOAP message too.

UDDI: Universal Description Discovery and Integration. This is an specification used to describe and discover web services.

All these concepts, are controlled by versions. It’s important see all the modifications made by W3C in these documents to avoid problems in integration of environments.

Here, we have a little explanation of the concepts associated to web services, only to put the reader in the context of the examples that we will show here.

Business Scenario

In this chapter, will be explained which business scenario are involved the solution created using web

services concepts.

In our company, and others too, we need to exchange information with third party softwares, that sometimes

are our business partners. In most cases, the information is in a file that has a text format, and is maintained

in a file server, with a standard root directory.

These third party software, need read or write files in our file server. When this third party software writes a

file in the server, a customized program in SAP R/3 will read this file to execute a business operation that

can be a sales order, purchasing order, and so on.

The information that goes to this third party software, is written by a customized program in SAP R/3 too, in a

file in the same standard root directory.

To better understand the technical solution created to this business scenario, we will divide this article in

SAP R/3 side, SAP XI side and consumer side.

http://www.w3c.org/



© 2010 SAP AG 4

SAP R/3 Side

In the SAP R/3 was developed a function that reads the standard directory from a file server, that maintain

these files. To have the reference of the root directory, was created a customized table that saves the root

directory of the file server.

For each kind of information, for example, customers, materials, price, master data, there is a specific

nomenclature of the file that indicate his name in the file server, and this information is maintained in a

customized table too, associated with a type of file, that indicates what kind of information contain the file, or

what kind of information will be written in the file server.

The parameters of this function (import) are the following:

Mailbox: this parameter, concatenated with the root directory that is saved in the customized table, gives the

directory to find the file.

File_Type: this parameter, indicate the file that will be read/write in the directory.

Event: this parameter indicates if a read or writes operation will be executed in the file server.

t_data_in: this parameter receives the information sent by the third party software, which will become a file,

in the file server.

The return of this function (export) is the following:

t_data_out: this is an internal table where each line, represents a line of the file.

SAP XI Side

The web service developed in the SAP XI has the same parameters of the function.

To connect SAP XI with R/3 system, it’s used the RFC adapter, that executes the mapping from the message received in the XI to a valid RFC call, and executes the function in the R/3 system.

Only these details will be showed here, because the focus of this article is to consume SAP XI web service from Visual Studio.

More details about RFC adapter, can be found in this link: RFC Adapter Documentation.

How was explained in the begin of this article, to develop our application, we will need the description of the service, that is in the WSDL file.

I do not have access to find the WSDL through a UDDI of our server. So, the developer that developed this web service, needs to download a WSDL into a file, that will be imported in the execution of our project.

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition

Visual Studio is one tool used to develop softwares to Windows platform.

The download of the application can be done here: Download Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

To consume SAP XI Web Service, will be developed a Windows Form application.

The objective of the application is to consume the web service created in the SAP XI.

In the next steps, we will show in Visual Studio how to create a project and import the WSDL that will be our reference to construct our application.

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/33/c6e63b60c25767e10000000a11402f/content.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/#2008-Visual-CS



© 2010 SAP AG 5

Creating the Visual Part of the Application

1) Create New Project

Step 1 – Create New Project.

Open Visual Studio C# 2008.

Go to Menu: File -> New Project.

Step 2 – Naming Windows Form Application

Choose “Windows Forms Application”.

In the field “Name” type the name of your project. We will call in this article “TestWebService”.

After, click on “OK”.



© 2010 SAP AG 6

Step 3 – Adding Web Reference

This is a very important step of our project. Here is the concept of interoperability coming true.

The WSDL file available by the developer of web service will be imported here like a “Web Service Reference”. Let’s see how this work:

Go to Menu: Project -> Add Service Reference.



© 2010 SAP AG 7

In the next screen, click on “Advanced…” button.

The next screen, click on “Add Web Reference…”button.



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In the next screen, in the “URL” field, type the directory where WSDL file was saved, that can be a network directory, a local machine directory or the URL of the XI Server if available.

After type the directory, click on “Go” button.

If everything is ok, Visual C# will find a service that is described on WSDL file.

In “Web reference name:” type the name of the web reference. This name will be used in our project to create instances of the class that Visual C# will create with reference to WSDL file, and in this project we will call “WebServiceXI”.

In the next screen, click on “Add Reference”.

After include our web reference, in the “Solution Explorer” our web reference will appear.



© 2010 SAP AG 9

Step 4 – Building Windows Form Application

These steps are needed to create an application that will help the reader to understand how we will consume the web service in Visual C#, so, let’s create an application with the most details as possible.

Here, I will explain how to create our Windows Form Application to consume the web service.

1) Rename Windows Form

First, rename the Windows Form:

Click on Windows Form, and in the tab “Properties” set the property “Text” with “Testing Web Service”.

2) Creating labels to our parameters

Our application will have the same parameters that were created in our web service.

So, I will input some labels to name our parameters.

In tab “Toolbox”, navigate to node “All Windows Forms” tab, search for “Label”.

Drag-and-drop the control to our form, like this:



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In the “Properties” tab, change the property “Text” to the name of our first parameter, called “Mailbox”.

Do the same step to the next parameters that will be used to consume the web service:

- Event - File Type

In the end of this step, we will have an application similar with this:



© 2010 SAP AG 11

3) Creating Text Box for our parameters:

Like we inserted the labels to our parameters, let’s do the same thing with our texts boxes:

Select “Text Box” in toolbox tab and drag-and-drop our parameter to our form.

For this control, we will not change the text, but we will change an important property, called “(Name)”.

Select your text box and go to “Properties” tab.

Search for “(Name)” property and change to “ParamMailbox”. This name will identify our object when we will code the application.



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Do the same step to the next parameters that will be used to consume the web service:

- Event (Property “(Name)”: ParamEvent); - File Type (Property “(Name)”: ParamFileType);

In the end of this step, we will have an application similar with this:



© 2010 SAP AG 13

4) Creating a check-box to access through a proxy:

If your application will run under a proxy to access the internet, we need to set a user and password to have access to internet.

To do this (the code will be explained in the next steps), we will create a check-box called “Proxy Server Access”.

In the tab “Toolbox”, navigate to node “All Windows Forms” tab, search for “CheckBox”.

Drag-and-drop this control to the application.

Select your check box and go to “Properties” tab.

Search for “(Name)” property and change to “ProxyAccess”. This name will identify our object when we will code the application.



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Still in the “Properties” tab, change the property “Text” to the name of our first parameter, called “Mailbox”.

This check box is to facilitate the use of this application, and to understand in the code in what moment the proxy server, user, password and domain will be set in the application.



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5) Creating button to call the Web Service:

In this step we will create a button that will execute a call to our web service.

Like the others, this is very a simple step.

In the tab “Toolbox”, navigate to node “All Windows Forms” tab, search for “Button”.


Select your button and go to “Properties” tab.

Search for “(Name)” property and change to “CallWebService”. This name will identify our object when we will code the application.



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Still in the “Properties” tab, search for “Text” property. Change this property to “Call Web Service!”.

After these steps, we will have a screen like this:



© 2010 SAP AG 17

6) Grid to view the return of the web service:

Well, we need to see the return of the web service, and, to do this, we will insert a data grid to show the return of the web service.

In the tab “Toolbox”, navigate to node “All Windows Forms” tab, search for “Button”.


In the window that will open, click on “Edit Columns”.

In the next screen that will appear, click on “Add”.



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In the next screen, type “t_data_out” that will be the name of the column in the field “Name:”, and the header text of the column in “Header text:”.

Set the check box “Visible” and “Read Only”, to set the column to do not be editable.

Click on “Add” and then “Close”. In the next screen, click on “OK”.



© 2010 SAP AG 19

In the next screen, resize the data grid.

Click on the data grid, and change the property “Name”, typing “WebServiceReturn”.



© 2010 SAP AG 20

Creating the Coding of the Application

To input the code in the application, give a double click in the button “Call Web Service!”.

We will go to a screen like this:

To better understand the code, I will insert in the code in little pieces and with comments to better understand. To each co-relational piece, I will explain the code. In the end of this article, the written code will be available to “copy-and-paste”.

Well, lets begin.

1) Classes to consume the web service

First we will instantiate the class with the interface of the web service, the class to do a request to the web service and the class to receive the return of the web service.

It’s important to say that these classes were created automatically when we imported the WSDL to our coding. The same way occurs when we import a WSDL to the XI or another development tool like NetBeans, to consume a web service that is in the internet for example. Of course that in the XI there are a visual interface to create a communication channel, and we will don't see the code created.



© 2010 SAP AG 21

2) Populate our web service request

In this step, we will pass the parameters of our windows form application to the class that is responsible to maintain the parameters of our web service request.

Beyond to pass the parameters from our application, we need to instantiate another class that has the objective of to set the user and password to connect to the XI server.

Change the string “user” and “password” to your user and password of your SAP XI server.

Like I sad in the step 4.4, we will input a code to treat the check-box “Proxy Access ?”.

If the check-box is checked, so we will instantiate another class to pass to WS_ITF the user, password and domain if applicable.

Change the string “user”, “password” and “domain” to your user, password and domain of your proxy server.



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3) Call web service

In this step, we will pass the class request (WS_REQ) to the class interface (WS_ITF). The class web service return (WS_RET) will be responsible to receive the response of the web service.

Here we will have a call to the URL of our XI Web Service. The URL is an item of the WSDL. This way of interoperability is simply fantastic because we have a pattern, and in theory all the development tools that are able to work with XML and web services can understand what the provider of the service needs to receive to execute the service and what kind of information it will return.

Below we can see the simplicity of placing a call to web service.



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4) Populating the Data Grid View

In this step, we will populate the data grid with the return of the web service.

This way we receive the return of the web service and populate the data grid view.



© 2010 SAP AG 24

5) DataGridView after execution

Here we can see the return of the web service in our data grid view, obviously with fictitious data.

So, we user a mailbox called 0197, that is a directory of our unix server, and the file type CUS (customer) to simulate a file that contains customer data, that can be used for a great range of applications, mobile in our solution for example.



© 2010 SAP AG 25

Conclusion

As we saw in this article, web services are showing yourself as a very important piece of the Service Oriented Architecture. Like I've wrote in the beginning of this article, web services are just a little piece of the whole architecture. In the internet, web services have been used in a great portion of the distributed applications.

The web service created to attend the company needs, created a new vision of the interfaces used today, that can be migrated to the SOA concept, to be better managed and reusable for other applications.

The files that are exchanged every day in our company (a considerable quantity) can be easily changed to a web service with the help of the SAP Exchange Infrastructure tecnologhy.

When a software can be developed and delivered with the aid of the tecnologies like web services and XML, we can affirm that it will decrease TCO of IT, principally because of the reusablity and interoperability of these services, as showed here using Visual Studio, that by the way is a very good tool.

But the concepts of XML are used in almost all tools of development.

All the biggest IT companys are investing in researches about SOA, and we can affirm that this is a way without comeback, and with sure, will help all the IT environment of the companies, and the IT staff.



© 2010 SAP AG 26

Related Content

Overview of Sap NetWeaver 2004

Integrating Remote Client/Web Services by Using the SOAP Adapter

Microsoft Developer Learning Center

SAP Community Network – SOA Topic

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/14/80243b4a66ae0ce10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/14/80243b4a66ae0ce10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/dd435692.aspx

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/soa



© 2010 SAP AG 27

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Documents

Consuming SAP XI Web Service With Microsoft Visual C%23 2008 Express Edition