programmatic SRM interface for users

[Former Member]

Hello,

My employer provides an SRM web-interface to place purchases. Many aspects of the UI are very inefficient and outdated, but being a public university, there are no funds to fix these issues.

I can get around many limitations by using web-automation to simulate the clicks and text edits that users manually perform in a browser (e.g. enter shopping cart details, place orders, check status). However, this is cumbersome and buggy.

I would much rather use some kind of API, e.g. JSON or XML requests, or any similar way to programmatically interact with the data from a programming language of my choice (e.g. python). I would like to stress that I only need to access the data that I can already access with my user login via the SRM web-interface – except in a more efficient way.

Does any such solution exist?

Best regards,

Benjamin

[Former Member]

Hi, have you analyze the new SAP UI ( SAP UI5 / SAP Fiori) I think that this is just what you're looking for since it's based on HTML5/Java Script.

There are many public information about this new UI technology at Open SAP website that's fully compatible with SAP.

Hope this help!

[Former Member]

Hi Maria, Thank you for this suggestion. However, I'd like to stress that I am not trying to write another SAP UI. I'd like write a client program (in my own chosen external programming language, such as python) that can communicate with the backend – thus bypass the SAP web UI.

[Former Member]

Hi Benjamin, I think that it is possible to implement what you need by using the standard APIs accessing as web services provided by SAP to display and modify the information regarding the documents.

Off course with lot of limitations since not all the functionality it's exposed by APIs or Web Services but most of the functionality can be accessed by APIs.

In my opinion few developments may be needed at SRM side but it is totally possible.

Regards!

[Former Member]

Glad to hear it's possible. Can you give me more specific pointers for the APIs to look into?

[ivy_li]

Hi,

Would you please explain your requirement with more specific examples so that we could give you some clue?
Do you want to replace the standard design logic? If so, which design logic?
If so, I would suggest you propose your request in our customer connection program which you might find the answer after discussing with the developers:

To submist a request, please go to https://influence.sap.com/SRM2016
For additional info, please following this link: https://influence.sap.com/uploads/SAP_Influence/OD5979/FB1AD0BD.pdf

BR,
Ivy

[Former Member]

Hi Ivy, thank you for the offer, yes I'd be happy to provide more details and examples.

Users presently have to use the browser-based SRM UI. Take for example the following typical steps if someone wants to place a purchase for 50 different kinds of screws: (1) enter SRM login URL into web-browser (2) log in with user credentials (3) browse to purchasing page, (4) manually enter shopping cart details for the first screw type into a text form, (5) click "add to shopping cart", (6...) then repeat this process 49 times for the other screw types. This is extremely tedious and a huge time/productivity sink.

To clarify, I am not asking how to improve the browser-based UI, but I am asking how to bypass it and directly talk to the backend from my own custom-written software.

I am not asking how exactly to write that external software, but I am asking whether there is an API or any kind of specification that would allow me to talk to the backend (e.g. from python, ruby, etc.).

For example: is it possible to talk to the backend using HTTP requests, json commands, or XML commands, using the same user credentials that users use for the web UI?

Another example: I can explore Twitter content in a web-browser, but I can also use the Twitter API to access the same data programmatically. Does any such API or comparable function exist for SAP SRM?

Thanks again,

Benjamin