Diff. ALE - IDoc

[Former Member]

Can anybody tell me what are the basic difference between ALE & EDI ?

And what are the various types of RFC & what are those ?

[Former Member]

Hi Sangram,

1)EDI

Electronic Data Interchange

Cross-company exchange of electronic data (for example business documents) between domestic and international business partners who use a variety of hardware, software, and communication services. The data involved is formatted according to predefined standards. In addition to this, SAP ALE technology is available for data exchange within a company.

Refer

http://www.erpgenie.com/sapedi/index.htm

2) ALE

A means of creating and operating distributed applications.

Application Link Enabling (ALE) guarantees a distributed, but integrated, R/3 installation. This involves business-controlled message exchange using consistent data across loosely linked SAP applications.

Applications are integrated using synchronous and asynchronous communication - not by using a central database.

ALE consists of the following layers:

Application services

Distribution services

Communication services

Refer

http://www.sappoint.com/abap/ale.pdf

http://www.sappoint.com/abap/ale2.pdf

Check this link

Types of RFC.

RFC:

Remote Function Call (RFC) is the standard SAP interface for communication between SAP systems. The RFC calls a function to be executed in a remote system.

Synchronous RFC:

The first version of RFC is synchronous RFC (sRFC). This type of RFC executes the function call based on synchronous communication, which means that the systems involved must both be available at the time the call is made.

Transactional RFC (tRFC) and Queued RFC (qRFC). tRFC is used mainly to transfer ALE Intermediate Documents (IDocs).

Transactional RFC:

If an error occurs during a synchronous remote function call, the system cannot tell at what point the error occurred (most crucially, whether the function module was actually processed in R/3 before the operation failed). Restarting a failed call is therefore a dangerous thing to do, since you risk duplicating a completed function call.

To alleviate this problem, you can use transactional RFC, which guarantees that each function call you issue will only be executed once, even if you submit it repeatedly to the R/3 System. The system implements this safeguard by assigning a unique transaction ID (TID) to each transaction that you submit. When you attempt to process the transaction, the system checks whether that TID has already been processed. If it has, the transaction is ignored.

Queued RFC:

When you use transactional RFC, you cannot guarantee the order in which the function calls will be processed in the system (it is quite possible that one call might overtake another). For cases where you need to specify a particular processing order, you can use queued RFC, which is an extension of transactional RFC. In qRFC, you place each function call in a logical queue. A function call cannot be executed until all of its predecessors in the queue have been processed. Queued RFC calls are processed asynchronously

For more information on RFC, please go through the link.

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/6f/1bd5b6a85b11d6b28500508b5d5211/content.htm

Regards,

Priyanka.

[Former Member]

Hi,

In simple words, ALE is used within the organization and EDI is used betn. the business partners.

For eg: in ALE, when you want other branches of your company to have the same data as your main branch. You transport the data through ALE methodology.

Whereas, EDI is used for communication betn ur co. & bank or co. & transport co., etc.

If the other end does not have SAP, then a middle layer like MERCATOR is used to convert SAP dat to non-SAP data and vice-versa.

Regards

Subramanian

[Former Member]

The basic difference is that ALE is the SAP technology for communications and you do not have to depend on 3rd party sofywares for the communication. EDI is the technology which requires you to define/create a sub-system that enables data transfers and these subsystems are 3rd party tools.

THe various types of RFCs used in the technology are

1. Synchronous RFC

2. Asynchronous RFC

3. Transactional RFC (tRFC)

[Former Member]

You can refer these links for ALE and EDI.

http://www.onestopsap.com/interview-Question/ale/

http://www.onestopsap.com/interview-Question/edi/

Two types of RFC are available,

Synchronous, and Asynchronous.