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Understand BizTalk Adapter for mySAP Business Suite

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The BizTalk Adapter Pack enables service-oriented programmatic access in order to interact with an external system. The adapters provide the following advantages to clients:

  • Consistent design-time experience. The adapters provide a common and user-friendly design time experience for browsing, searching, and retrieving metadata of LOB artifacts.

  • Varied programming options. The adapters provide a choice of programming model including Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channel model, WCF service model, ADO.NET, web services, or BizTalk supported models.

  • Uniform experience across LOBs. The adapters standardize on using the WCF and Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line of Business (LOB) Adapter SDK and hence provide a uniform experience of gaining access to any LOB system.

    As mentioned, the adapters are built on top of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. The WCF LOB Adapter SDK provides a common basis for building integration adapters that a variety of client applications such as BizTalk Server and Microsoft Office can consume. The WCF LOB Adapter SDK aligns the adapter strategy with the Microsoft Services strategy by exposing integration adapters as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channels. For more information about the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, see WCF LOB Adapter SDK documentation.

    To perform operations on an SAP system, adapter clients must have access to the relevant Remote Function Calls (RFCs), Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs), and IDOCs (or intermediate documents). An SAP R/3 system exposes RFCs, BAPIs, and IDOCs for business integration. RFCs are remote function modules that implement specific business logic. This logic can be invoked from an external application such as BizTalk Server or a .NET application. BAPIs are method interfaces to SAP business objects, which are in turn exposed through standard RFC interfaces. IDOCs are a mechanism to abstract the electronic data interchange (EDI) communication layer for communication between SAP and non-SAP systems. With Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for mySAP Business Suite, you can access the RFCs, BAPIs, and IDOCs exposed by an SAP system.

    The SAP adapter also includes .NET Framework Data Provider for mySAP Business Suite, which provides an ADO interface to the SAP system.

    This section lists the features for the SAP adapter and the .NET Framework Data Provider for mySAP Business Suite.

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