SAP XI/PI/PO tutorial for beginners: SAP XI/PI/PO tutorial for beginners

Introduction

SAP Net Weaver Process Integration (SAP PI) is SAP enterprise application integration (EAI) software, a component of the NetWeaver product group used to facilitate the exchange of information among a company's internal software and systems and those of external parties.

While implementing the SAP ERP in a large business establishment, it is found that not all sections can be brought under the SAP ERP. Many of the business sections may have their own proprietary tools, which are highly complex and may not be possible to replace. They run parallel to the SAP System. They are called the Legacy Systems. Then it becomes necessary to integrate between the SAP Systems and such pre-existing non-SAP System. This is where the SAP PI comes into play.

Why do we need SAP PI?

Apart from Legacy Systems, in a large business establishment, SAP ERP does not consist of a single system but several integrated systems i.e. CRM, SRM and FICO etc. To handle with such complexities SAP introduced Process Integration a platform to provide a single point of integration for all systems without touching existing complex network of legacy systems. This is a powerful middleware by SAP to provide seamless end-to-end integration between SAP and non-SAP applications inside and outside the corporate boundary. SAP PI supports B2B as well as A2A exchanges, supports synchronous and asynchronous message exchange and includes built in engine for designing and executing Integration Processes

Lifecycle of SAP PI

• The first version of Exchange Infrastructure is XI 2.0 then XI 3.0

• Exchange Infrastructure 2.0. Release Date : Dec 2003

• Exchange Infrastructure 3.0. Release Date : Dec 2005

• Process integration is from PI 7.0, PI 7.1, PI 7.11 & PI 7.30

• Process Integration 7.0. Release Date : June 2006

• Process Integration 7.1. Release Date : July 2008

• Process Integration 7.11. Release Date : July 2009

• Process Integration 7.30. Release Date : May 2011

• Process Orchestration from PO 7.31, PO 7.4 & PO 7.5

• Process Orchestration 7.31. Release Date : May 2012

• Process Orchestration 7.4. Release Date : May 2013

• Process Orchestration 7.5. Release Date : Oct 2015

• Single stack ESB was introduced from SAP PI 7.30 released on May 2011.

Single stack and dual stack

When PI was first released, not all components were built on the same platform. Integration Engine and Business Process Engine was built in ABAP while Adapter Engine, Integration Builder, SL, CM and Mapping Runtime were built in Java. Therefore, PI needs both the Java and the ABAP environment to run and is known as the dual stack.

But in the later version all the components are built in Java. Some of the dual-stack components are either not used or modified to work on the Java stack. Therefore, PI needs only the Java environment to run and that is called single stack.

Architecture of SAP PI

We can divide the SAP PI into several areas

Integration Server
Integration Builder
System Landscape
Configuration and Monitoring

Integration Server can be termed as the Central Processing Engine of SAP PI. All the messages in PI gets processed here in this engine.

It consist of three different Engines. Those are

Advanced Adapter Engine
Integration Engine
Business Process Engine

Advanced Adapter Engine

Runs on Java stack.
Converts native data to PI messages and vice versa.
Forwards messages to Integration Engine for further processing.

Adapters in Advance Adapter Engine : FILE, JDBC, JMS, SOAP, RFC, WS-ADAPTER, REST SFTP, AS2, EDISEPARATOR, OFTP, X400, ODATA, SFSF, BC, CDIX, RNIF, RNIF11,

WS_AAE, HTTP_AAE, ICOD_AAE

Integration Engine

Runs on ABAP stack.
Processes the messages according to the configuration defined in the Integration Builder.
Adapters in integration engine : IDOC and HTTP

Business Process Engine

Uses SAP workflow Engine.
Executes the Business Process Management (BPM) steps.

Integration Builder is a client-server framework for accessing and editing integration objects and it consists of two related tools:

Enterprise Service Repository – to design and develop objects to be used in scenarios

Integration Directory – to configure the ESR objects to develop scenarios

Two together, we built integration processes which are commonly called scenarios.

The System Landscape is a central repository of information about software and systems in data center and simplifies the administration of your system landscape.

In Configuration and Monitoring, we can monitor the messages and adapters.

A message in PI can be of two types:

Synchronous - has both the request-response part

Synchronous messages are flagged with Quality of Service (QoS) Best Effort. In this case,

further processing in the sending application is blocked until a response is received.

Asynchronous - has either the request or the response part only

Asynchronous messages are processed with Quality of Service Exactly Once (equivalent to tRFC) or Exactly Once In Order (equivalent to qRFC).

In PI, message is represented by an interface.

Interface -> structure of the message in XML format + direction

Based on the above criteria, there are three types of interfaces

1. Outbound interface – connect to the sender system

2. Inbound interface – connect to the receiver system

3. Abstract interface – connect to the BPE

Architectural differences-AEX

SAP PI Homepage

The SAP PI tools Home screen looks like this

This home page can be accessed by using the tcode sxmb_ifr from your SAP GUI or using the URL: http://<host>:5<instance#>00/dir/start/index.jsp

The SAP PI home page consist of four main java links:

Integration Builder : Enterprise Service Repository
Integration Builder : Integration Directory
System Landscape
Integration Monitoring : Configuration and monitoring

Creating the products, software component and assigning Technical system and business system to the created products is done in the System Landscape directory(SLD). Design these objects is done in the Enterprise Service Repository(ESR),configuration in the Integration Directory and monitoring in the Runtime Workbench.

Enterprise Service Repository
In SAP PI, Enterprise Service Repository is used to design and create objects to be used in the integration scenario. You can design Interface Objects, Mapping Objects and the different integration processes.

The following are the Interface Objects

· Service Interface

· Data type

· Message type

Mapping of messages is done as per the sender and the receiver data structure

Integration process:

Operation Mapping is used for converting the source structure to target structure if data structure is different. Complex Operation Mapping can be simplified using Message Mapping.

Message Mapping can be implemented in the following ways −

Graphical Mapping
Java Mapping
XSLT Mapping
ABAP Mapping

Mapping is used for transformation of one structure (input) to another structure (output). And the transformation rules are defined by the mapping program. Mapping programs are developed at design time using Enterprise Services Repository or any other tool. These mapping programs are used at run time during the transformation of different structures using the configuration information provided using the Integration Directory.

Graphical Mapping

Can be designed by using graphical editor provided in the ESR.

XSLT and Java Mapping

For these two, there is no tool support in PI. To make them available for the integration server, they have to be developed externally and imported into the ESR as JAR files.
Can be designed externally and imported into ESR.
Java mappings are implemented by using a specific class.
XSLT mappings are designed by using various tools like Stylus studio, Altova XML Spy etc. as runtime supports XSLT processor.

ABAP Mapping

An ABAP functional module or program can be used for transforming messages.

Integration Directory

Here we make the pipe-line steps by configuring the ESR objects created earlier. These steps are executed by the integration engine during run-time.

Before we start the configuration we need to create/import the following objects in the DIR.

· Service - Business System/ Business Service/ Integration Process
Communication Channel

Service allows you to address the sender or the receiver of messages. Depending on how you want to use the service, you can select from the following service types:

Business System
Business Service
Integration Process Service

Communication channel determines the inbound and outbound processing of messages. The messages are converted from native format to soap-xml specific message format and vice-versa through the adapter. Generally, there are two types of communication channel in a scenario: Sender Communication Channel and Receiver Communication Channel.

The pipe-line steps are created by creating the following 4 configuration in the DIR:

· Sender Agreement − this determines how the message is transformed by Integration server.

· Receiver Determination − this is used to determine information of receiver to whom message to be sent.

· Interface Determination − this is used to determine the inbound interface to which the message is to be sent. This also determines the interface mapping for processing the message.

· Receiver agreement − this defines how a message is to be transformed and processed by the receiver.

Aspects of an incoming message

Inbound Processing – Inbound processing defines how the incoming message has to be transformed technically to the XML message format that the integration broker can understand.

Routing - Defines to which receivers the incoming message is to be sent to. The configuration of routing may also include routing conditions.

Mapping - Defines how the business data of the message is to be transformed with regard to a particular receiver.

Outbound processing - Defines how the incoming message has to be transformed technically with respect to a specific receiver. Outbound processing again implies a technical transformation step: A transformation from the XML message format that the integration broker speaks to the protocol or standard that the receiver system can handle

Integrated Configuration

Integrated Configuration object allows configuring Local Processing in the Advanced Adapter Engine

New Directory object that includes multiple configuration objects into one and hence called “Integrated” configuration object.

Used for configuring local processing within advance adapter engine.

Integrated Configuration=Sender Agreement +Interface Determination + Receiver Determination+ Receiver Agreement.

The ICO is transferred as one single object to the AAE.

System Landscape

The System Landscape Directory contains the information about landscape and software component versions. A SAP system can be configured to register under this directory. System Landscape Directory (SLD) manages information about all installable and installed elements of your system landscape.

You can find the following links in a web page:

Landscape:

Under Landscape, you can find the following options −

Technical Systems − You can view and define systems and servers.
Landscapes − You can view and configure group of systems.
Business Systems − You can view and configure business systems for use in Process Integration.

Software catalog

Products − This is to view products in SAP software catalog.
Software components − This is to view software components in SAP Software catalog.

Development

Name Reservation − This is used for name reservation and also for NW development.

Products and components are the information about all available SAP products and components, including their versions. If there are any third-party products in the system landscape, they are also registered here.

Component Information are used in the ESR to define the Product and the SWCV.

Technical systems are application systems that are installed in your system landscape.

Business System are used in the Directory for defining the sender and receiver of messages.

Configuration and Monitoring

The Configuration and Monitoring option on SAP PI tools Home Page allows you to monitor the functions of the integration engine, CCMS integration and process monitoring infrastructure in SAP system.

It is the central entry point for monitoring purposes. This gives you the option of navigating to the monitoring functions of the Integration Engine, as well as integration with the Computing Center Management System (CCMS), and the Process Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) of SAP.

Component monitoring - monitoring the different SAP PI components (Java and ABAP parts).
Message monitoring - tracking the message processing status within an SAP PI component and on error detection and analysis.
End-to-end monitoring - monitoring of a message lifecycle from the SAP PI point of view.
Performance monitoring - statistics about different performance aspects of SAP PI can be accessed through the RWB. Here, you can select and aggregate performance data, for example, by component, time range, or message attributes.
Index administration - by administering and monitoring the indexing of messages per SAP PI component, you enable an index-based message search that you can use in message monitoring. This kind of message search offers you enhanced selection criteria including adapter-specific message attributes and terms or phrases from the message payload
Alert configuration - by using the Alert Framework, central monitoring in PI can be provided with all errors reported during message processing in ABAP and Java. This enables an improved reaction to such errors in both the ABAP runtime and the Java-based Adapter Engine. For this purpose, the Alert Framework is provided with rules based on certain events and on information from the header of the PI message protocol. These rules determine whether alerts are send or not. If an alert is sent, it can be used for error analysis.
Alert inbox - the alert inbox is user-specific and displays all the alerts for each alert server that has been generated based on the alert configuration.
Cache monitoring - cache monitoring displays objects that are currently in the runtime cache. Different cache objects are monitored depending on the cache instance concerned.

Adapters in SAP PI

1	RFC Adapter This is used to communicate with other SAP systems using RFC interface.
2	HTTP Adapter/HTTP AAE Adapter This allows the exchange of data using HTTP protocol. These adapters are available both in the Integration Engine and also in the Advanced Adapter Engine.
3	JDBC Adapter This allows access to databases.
4	File/FTP Adapter This is used to perform data exchange with external systems using a file interface or an FTP server.
5	Mail Adapter This allows you to connect e-mail servers to the Integration Engine.
6	IDoc Adapter This allows the exchange of IDocs. These adapters are available both in the Integration Engine and also in the Advanced Adapter Engine.
7	XI Adapter This adapter allows you to communicate using proxy. This adapter does not run in the Advanced Adapter Engine and runs in the Integration Engine. XI Adapter is used only for establishing the HTTP connection to the receiver.
8	JMS Adapter It enables communication with messaging systems using the JMS API.
9	WS Adapters This adapter is used to provide the connectivity with WS providers and WS consumers according to the standard Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM) protocol. SAP has developed the WS-RM protocol with its own inbox, which is implemented in the ABAP stack on the Integration Engine.
10	SOAP Adapter It allows the integration of remote clients or Web service providers using SOAP.

Transporting objects in SAP PI

In Order to know how the transport mechanism in PI works we will first look at the landscape that we are interested in.

We use this procedure to transport any PI object or integration flows with their referenced entities from a development to test environment or from a test to a production environment using the File or CTS+ transport type. The File transport type allows you to export the objects from a source system to a locally stored .tpz file and import the file into a target system. If you want to export objects from a source system and easily import to multiple target systems in a landscape, you can choose CTS+ transport type.