Wow, its been a busy couple of months here.
I was looking forward to getting to the Microsoft SOA conference in Seattle back at the start of October, but I ended up being pulled back to Toronto for a pressing BizTalk opportunity we had going. That opportunity pretty much took all of my time for the first couple of weeks of October. The team here was pretty busy running the Canadian BizTalk Partner Roadshow (outlined in my last post). I had a chance to meet some great partners during the roadshow, but I’ll save that discussion for a future post.
For now, I wanted to some of the work we had to do for the that opportunity that kept me from getting to the Microsoft SOA conference. One of the things that we had to show was how the BizTalk SAP adapter could be installed, configured and used. Since the process can be a bit confusing and tricky, I thought I’d post the steps I followed.
Step 1 – The obvious first step is to install and configure BizTalk 2006. I won’t go into the details of this as there are already a bunch of detailed documents out there that outline this process. Once this is done, you’ll likely wonder where the SAP adapter is. It isn’t installed as part of the core BizTalk Server installation process. The adapter comes in a separate installation package and you’ll need to make sure you have this before you proceed further.
Step 2 – The SAP.NET Connector is a prerequisite for the BizTalk SAP adapter and must be installed before you try installing the adapter. This is the trickiest step for most people and is often the most frustrating part of the process. The frustration comes from trying to figure out what version of the connector you need to install for your BTS 2006 environment. There are multiple versions of the connector and if you don’t have the correct one, then nothing is going to work for you. One of the most common errors people hit when installing connector is that the it has a dependancy on Visual Studio 2003. Since BizTalk 2006 is dependant on Visual Studio 2005, the installation fails and you’re stuck. Beyond this specific error, there are a number of other errors that you can run into if you aren’t using the correct version. The key to getting past these issue is to install the SAP.NET Connector Runtime version 1.0.3. The runtime version does not have the VS 2003 dependancy and you’ll be able to install it in your BizTalk 2006 environment. A key note, the Connector is not provided by Microsoft and you will have to obtain this from SAP.
Step 3 -Before you get too far into this process, you’ll want to contact your SAP administrator to get your hands on the connection/username/password information. You’ll obviously need this information when we set about configuring the adapter. From my experience, getting connection information and username/password info can often take a few days. Therefore, I recommend asking for this as soon as you find out you’ll need to use the adapter.
In all honesty, getting your hands on the connector and getting the proper connection information will take the majority of your time (It did for me). Once you’re past these steps, the remaining steps can be completed quite quickly. In fact, I’ve attached a short AVI file that shows the remaining steps. Feel free to download it and use it however you need (training, client demos etc) as it really shows how simple it is to configure and use the adapter. The entire movie is only 4 minutes long and its about 1.5 megs zipped.
Step 5 – You’ll need to install the SAP adapter. It’s a pretty simple install and when its done, you’ll be able to see the new SAP adapter using the Biztalk Admistration Console. (This is shown in the AVI)
Step 6 – Once the adapter is installed, we’ll need to configure it and setup a send port that we can use to connect to the live environment and generate our message schemas. (Shown in the AVI) Note, that we want to configure the adapter before we do anything else in Visual Studio.
Step 7 – Now that the adapter is installed, we can use it to generate our schemas. To generate the SAP schemas, right click on your project, select “Add->Add Generated Item”. From the pop-up window, select the “Add Adapter Metadata” option and the Adapter Metadata wizard will launch. One the wizard’s first screen, select the SAP option. You’ll need to provide the name of the SQL Server and the database where your SAP Adapter is configured. Once you have entered this info, the adapter you already created will show in the third drop down. You’ll then be presented with a search screen that will allow you to search against the IDOCs and RFC functions in your SAP environment. (Note, you can use the * wildcard when searching). Once you select the IDOC or RFC you want to generate the schema for, select the next button and the schemas will be generated for you.
Setp 8 – You’re done, go ahead and develop the rest of the BizTalk project as you normally would.
The AVI file will show as a link at the end of this post. I filmed it at 1024×768 so set your resolution to this before running.
Cheers and keep on BizTalking.
Peter