Connectors

SAP provides the following five Connectors, which can be used for exchanging data between different external systems/technological environments and an SAP ABAP system. Supported communication technologies are RFC, HTTP and IDocs. In all cases, the communication can be performed in both directions:

• the external system can execute functionality inside the ABAP system, sending inputs into the ABAP system and (potentially) receiving the results of the operation in the response ("client case")
• the ABAP system can execute functionality inside the external system/environment, sending inputs to the external system and (potentially) receiving the results of the external operation in the response ("server case")

If the external system can be extended via C/C++ coding, the NW RFC SDK may be the tool of your choice. Also there are bindings available for other programming languages, which provide a native C interface, like Python, Perl, PHP or Go.

Supported communication technologies are RFC and WebSocket RFC.

Please see the following links for downloading the SDK, documentation and samples:

• SAP NW RFC SDK
• SAP PyRFC

OSS component: BC-MID-RFC-SDK

If the external system can be extended via Java Coding, you can use JCo for connecting to an SAP ABAP system. Supported communication technologies are RFC, WebSocket RFC and IDoc.

The necessary libraries, documentation and samples can be downloaded from SAP JCo.

If you want to integrate a Microsoft .NET based environment or Windows frontend applications with an SAP ABAP system, NCo is the appropriate tool. It supports RFC and Websocket RFC communication.

The necessary libraries, documentation and samples can be downloaded from SAP NCo.

OSS component: BC-MID-CON-NCO

While the previous three Connectors are "development kits", which enable the integration with external systems on source code level, the SAP Business Connector is a middleware server that allows to integrate external systems, whose source code is not available or cannot be modified, but which provide some kind of public interface for communication, e.g. an XML-, JSon-, OData-, SOAP-, EDI- or flatfile-interface that can be accessed by a standard network protocol like HTTP(S), FTP, Email, MIME or JDBC.

Supported communication technologies are RFC, Websocket RFC, IDoc, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3 and JDBC.

Besides support for various network protocols, the SAP BC also provides

• mapping tools for transforming the data format of the external system (e.g. certain XML trees, EDI records or JSon structures) into the data format of the SAP system (e.g. RFC tables or IDoc segments)
• general purpose XML parser and renderer
• HTML parser (for extracting data from HTML pages like online catalogues)
• XSLT mapping engine
• tools for composing/decomposing multi-part MIME/SMIME messages
• tools for encrypting/decrypting or digitally signing messages
• tools for applying other operations to the data, like zip/gzip, Base64 encoding, URL-encoding
• a Transaction Store for logging & monitoring transactional messages
• a Job Scheduler for executing arbitrary periodic jobs
• if none of the predefined tools matches your requirements, you can easily extend the available functionality by plugging in custom modules written in Java or C/C++

Installers can be downloaded from https://support.sap.com/sbc-download.
Documentation is available at SAP Business Connector in Detail.

The Cloud Connector is a tool that provides a secure TLS tunnel between an on-premise SAP system and your cloud application running on SAP BTP. Some more solutions can also make use of SAP BTP Connectivity, among them are SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP IBP, and SAP Data Intelligence. Cloud applications can call SAP backend functionality in your data center without having to open a port for inbound traffic on your corporate firewall.

Access control lists control exactly, which backend systems can be accessed from cloud side and for HTTP and RFC even which resources (HTTP: service paths; RFC: RFC-enabled function modules) can be executed.

Supported communication technologies are RFC, HTTP, JDBC/ODBC, LDAP, and general purpose TCP.

Installers can be downloaded from SAP Development Tools page

Online documentation: SAP BTP Connectivity, Cloud Connector section

OSS component: BC-MID-SCC