I will be talking about ‘Enabling Reporting and Analytics for your Supply Chain. I will be delivering this presentation with Geoff Armstrong – National Service Line Lead Business Intelligence, Plaut IT Australia Pty Ltd.

All together there will be 34 presentations and the highlights include:

• Most up to date SAP product releases available in the market
• Access More Supply Chain Data with SAP BusinessObjects to Extend Your Reporting Capabilities
• Take Control of Master Data by Centralising Control, Addressing Change Management Issues and Training Staff
• Rethink Services Procurement in Mining: Lessons for Other Spend Categories and Industries
• Get Past “We’re Different” and Standardise BI Reports Across Your Enterprise
• How Coca-Cola Manages Direct Store Deliveries Using Strategic Route Optimisation and Vehicle Space Optimisation Solutions
• The Future Direction of Sales and Operations Planning in SAP
• Make Warehouses and Logistics More Efficient Through Voice Picking
• Integrate APO to Drive the S&OP Process
• Automate Employee-Facing Transactions in the Supply Chain
• Get Your Inventory Basics Right with WMS
• Use SAP Solutions for Enterprise Contract Management
• Use Outline Agreements for Service Contracts
• Initiate Cultural Change in Supplier and Operations Relationships with Invoice Automation
• Sell the Proposition of Procurement Beyond Just Reducing Costs – Into Delivering Higher Value and Generating Revenue
• Analyse Supplier Enablement Solutions in Conjunction with Your SAP Solution and How to Determine ROI for Such an Implementation

Register today to be part of this great event.

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If you are using the Service Desk functionality of Solution Manager, you may know that it is possible to create support requests right from your satelite SAP system. This is a really neat functionality because it allows you to report an incident right there and then when it happens – i.e there is no need for you to connect to a solution manager system, either via the SAP GUI or portal to report the incident.

To do that, you will find a “Create suport message” menu entry that allows you to do just that.

The trouble is that if your system administrator has not done the customising that enables for your SAP system to know the destination of the incident (the rfc destination of you solution manager system), then you will get an error message such as the one below.

So to correct this you need to add an entry in the table BCOS_CUST. To add that entry go to transaction SM31 in maintenance mode.

You then need to add an entry identical to the one below (except that you must of course indicate the rfc destination of your Solution Manager system).

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According to Wikipedia, “Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines”. I don’t think that this definition does do it any justice – I think that RIA’s are:

• Applications that offer a visually rich and engaging user interface
• Applications that offer content richness and useful and diverse functionalities

In other words it has to deliver functionality and it has to do so in an engaging UI – the argument being that such applications will deliver a greater employee productivity and/or customer loyalty. I would certainly vouch for that – go see a demo of SAP Business Explorer to see what I mean (you can even
upload your own data and play around with that).

As a continuation to my experiments in marrying technologies such as Php, Pear & Ajax to query a SAP database and expose the data to a user in a visually appealing form, it seemed only fitting that I would give this RIA thing a shot too. You only need to google terms such as “SAP FLEX” to see that there is
a wealth of information out there on that topic showcasing these two platforms with plenty of whoa factor. Being from a logistics background I thought it would be appropriate to use logistics functions in my examples.

So in this post I’ll be looking at the following scenarios:

• A sales application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A production order application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A sample sales application using SAP and Flex (web service call method)

The tools of choice for my experiments today are:

• Adobe Flex (which is built on top of Eclipse – the same tool used to build the SAP Developer Studio). Adobe is very generously offering you the chance to download a try-before-you-buy fully functional demo version for 60 days (if you have already have Eclipse or SAP developer Studio you may elect to download the plug-in instead – although I have not tried that).
• Easyphp which is a nice WAMP (Windows Apache Mysql Php) package that I have been using for years – php in version 5.2.8
• The SAPrfc extension module for Php
• Of course SAP. The SAP backend system I’ll be using is a SAP ECC 6.0 system.

In the first two scenarios, I’ll be using php as the go between Flex and SAP.

Essentially the Flex application will call an http service that is a php script to which we’ll be posting some variables. Php will then wrap those variables in an RF call to the SAP backend system. Assuming all goes well, SAP will send a response that needs to be formatted in a xml like structure so that that it can be properly interpreted by the Flex application – again php will take care of that.

echo "<CUSTRECS>\n";
		for($i=1; $i<=$ADDRESSDATA ; $i++){
			$DATA = saprfc_table_read ($fce,"ADDRESSDATA",$i);
			echo "<CUSTREC>\n<CUSTNUMB>" . $DATA["CUSTOMER"] . "</CUSTNUMB>\n";
			echo "<CUSTADR>" . $DATA["STREET"] . "</CUSTADR>\n";
			echo "<CUSTCOUNT>" . $DATA["COUNTRY"] . "</CUSTCOUNT>\n";
			echo "<CUSTCITY>" . $DATA["CITY"] . "</CUSTCITY>\n";
			echo "<CUSTNAME>" . $DATA["NAME"] . "</CUSTNAME>\n</CUSTREC>\n";
		}
echo "</CUSTRECS>";

will yield an xml response to the Flex application as below,

<CUSTRECS>
	<CUSTREC>
		<CUSTNUMB>0000100000</CUSTNUMB>
		<CUSTADR>800 Gardiner Street</CUSTADR>
		<CUSTCOUNT>AU</CUSTCOUNT>
		<CUSTCITY>Darwin</CUSTCITY>
		<CUSTNAME>Customer domestic 00</CUSTNAME>
	</CUSTREC>
</CUSTRECS>

and in the Flex script below, on lines 5 and 6, you can see how I’ll be retrieving the customer number (CUSTNUMB) and customer name (CUSTNAME) in my Flex datagrid.

<mx:DataGrid dataProvider="{srv3.lastResult.CUSTRECS.CUSTREC}"
width="368" height="119" y="10" x="10" id="dg1"
change="dgChangeHandler()" dropShadowEnabled="true">
	<mx:columns>
		<mx:DataGridColumn dataField="CUSTNUMB" headerText="Customer Number"/>
		<mx:DataGridColumn dataField="CUSTNAME" headerText="Customer Name" textAlign="left"/>
	</mx:columns>
</mx:DataGrid>

So, without further adue, below are explanations and swf animations for each process.

A simple sales order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• An http service calling BAPI_CUSTOMER_GETLIST is used to populate one datagrid
• An http service calling BAPI_MATERIAL_GETLIST is used to populate another datagrid. The product pictures are stored locally on the web server, and the picture filename corresponds to the material number in SAP (eg if the material is called Y126, we have a picture file called Y126.jpg)
• The user will then pick the customer expected delivery date, the required quantity and indicate a selling price
• The Order button will then post the data to another http service in order to create the sales order (by calling the FM CREATE_SD_ORDERDAT1) in SAP. If all goes well a response with the sales order number will be issued to the user.

* Note that some values have been hard-coded in the php files (but they could just as well have come from posted variables). Also, the user will be required to type in his SAP credentials (the SAP server information has been hardcoded in the php file, but we are passing the SAP username and password to the script).

Here is a swf example of this application.

A simple production order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• There are two tabs in this application. One tab will show the data in a tabular form whilst the other tab is geared toward delivering the information graphically.
• An initial http service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST is used to populate a datagrid containing production order header details. The response provided by SAP is first interpreted and transformed into xml by Php.
• The same http service above will not only deliver production order header data, but also aggregated data that will be used to drive some of the charts in the graphical dashboards. All this data is delivered in one xml formatted stream.
• Whenever a line is selected in the production order header datagrid, it will trigger for another service call to be executed and this time call BAPI_PRODORD_GET_DETAIL in order to retrieve the production order component and operation details.

Here is a swf example of this application.

A very simple production order header report

In this last example, similar to the one above we will consume a web service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST and populate the retrieved data in a Flex datagrid – nothing more here – if just to show another method to get the production order header information.

The corresponding Flex Project can be downloaded here. Remember to change your server name and port before using it.

Here is a swf example of this application.

Recommended readings

Rich Internet Application Development on SDN

PHP Development on SDN

Engaging User Interfaces with Adobe Flex
Consuming ABAP Web Services using Flex a hands-on tutorial given by Matthias Zeller, Ed Herrmann, and Dan McWeeney

I hope you find these examples interesting and if you do find them useful and if there is anything you’d like to share, then please do leave a comment.

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To set the scene this is what will be shown:

• We will first call a PHP script that uses BAPI BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST to retrieve a list of SAP production orders.
• As time goes by the amount of production orders that live in a system can be quite staggering and I didn’t want to bombard the user with thousands of production orders in one go. To solve that problem I’m using PEAR, to be more specific I’m using the Structures_DataGrid package to setup the paged navigation and render the data in html format (I highly recommend this package as it takes care of everything for you and you can even style the output as you want it)
• Once we have the data output (a list of production orders) we will then want to see a bit more detail for a chosen production order. This is where AJAX comes in. We will make an asynchronous call to another PHP script that calls the BAPI BAPI_PRODORD_GET_DETAIL.
• The result of that AJAX call, is that the current page (or part of it) will be refreshed with new content. The content will be detailed production order information.

If you can’t wait to read this post to the end, I’ve recorded a small flash animation that demonstrates exactly what I have outlined above. The animation can be viewed here (Give the file time to load as it makes approx 4.8Mb).

So we start out with a list of orders:

Clicking on the detail icon will reveal detailed data about the production order:

Finally we’ve added an image which shows an overlay of:

• The list of orders
• The order detail showing the operations and the components of the order
• A screenshot of the operations (in SAP)
• A screenshot of the components (in SAP)

What? No code? do I hear you say. Well as there are very rarely comments made on the code, I’m not going to bother including any in this post – it’s up to you to change that….

As usual these tests have been made using an HP (Compaq nc6220) laptop running on MS Windows XP Pro, the Apache server version 1.3.33 and the PHP scripting engine in version 4.3.10 and of course the SAPRfc library (the Apache/PHP install was that installed via the EasyPhp package). SAP side I was using SAP ERP ECC (ERP Central Component) 5.0. I also used the script.aculo.us javascript libraries. You can download them here.

]]> http://www.renet-web.net/2006/05/22/re-writing-sap-with-php-part-15/feed/ 8 http://www.renet-web.net/2006/05/13/re-writing-sap-with-php-part-1/ http://www.renet-web.net/2006/05/13/re-writing-sap-with-php-part-1/#comments Sat, 13 May 2006 07:33:46 +0000 Pascal http://www.renet-web.net/2006/05/13/re-writing-sap-with-php-part-1/ Don’t let the title fool you, I’m not quite there yet. I’ve already written a few posts that dealt with integrating SAP and PHP (which you can find here and here to get you started), but…

Don’t let the title fool you, I’m not quite there yet. I’ve already written a few posts that dealt with integrating SAP and PHP (which you can find here and here to get you started), but I thought it was time to take it to another level. So what I’ve done here is to try and build a portal of sorts and bundled together scripts that will allow one to perform various request to a SAP system. All the scripts I’ve written so far deal with material masters in one way or another.

Controlling the access

Up till now, I have in all my scripts hard coded all the necessary logon parameters (system, user, password, etc…). Now this is fine because if I had to change my password in say 2-3 scripts that would be manageable. But let’s for a second imagine that I embark on a script writing frenzy and I write 20-30 scripts and for some reason I have to change one of the logon parameters….change 20-30 scripts – No thank you! So first up on the cards was to re-think how I pass those parameters to the various scripts so that I can correctly invoke all the necessary Remote Function Calls (RFC’s). Also if someone is going to use (God forbid) these scripts then they will probably want to have a user, use his credentials and not some generic user (and from a licensing point of view SAP will probably be happier too).

The answer to that question was easy: Ask a user to type in his SAP user and password, then check to see (SAP side) if that user exists. If yes, then he can access the portal and if not, then he can’t – simple. We also want for the user to type his credentials only once and pass them on from page to page. To this effect we’ll also start using PHP session variables so they are propagated throughout the session during which the user is logged on.

The logon parameters are now passed through PHP session variables as shown below:

• JGxvZ2luID0gYXJyYXkgKA==

• IkFTSE9TVCI9PiRfU0VTU0lPTlsnYXNob3N0J10s

• IlNZU05SIj0+JF9TRVNTSU9OWydzeXNuciddLA==

• IkNMSUVOVCI9PiRfU0VTU0lPTlsnY2xpZW50J10s

• IlVTRVIiPT4kX1NFU1NJT05bJ3VzZXInXSw=

• IlBBU1NXRCIgPT4kX1NFU1NJT05bJ3Bhc3N3ZCddKTs=

I’ve made a simple form (the server, system number and client fields have been pre-filled for the user) in which someone wishing to log on only has to input their SAP user and password. Also note that I’m trying to work at having a visually appealing content. The values typed in those fields will then be used to query SAP using the BAPI,

QkFQSV9VU0VSX0dFVF9ERVRBSUw=

. The script will query the SAP username. If it exists it will return the user’s firstname and lastname which we’ll use to greet him. If not it will return an error.

We’ll use the import parameter

VVNFUk5BTUU=

• saprfc_import ($fce,”USERNAME”,$_SESSION["user"]);

The information we want is in the export parameter

QUREUkVTUw==

• $result = saprfc_export ($fce, “ADDRESS”);

The firstname and lastname returned will be assigned to session variables also

• $_SESSION["lastname"] = $result["LASTNAME"];
• $_SESSION["firstname"] = $result["FIRSTNAME"];

Assuming the SAP user input was correct, we will then be presented with the ‘portal’, from which we can execute all the scripts available. Notice that thanks to

QkFQSV9VU0VSX0dFVF9ERVRBSUw=

we can greet the user in more personalized fashion: By using his name.

The script I will be focussing on in this post is :

• Material reports (this report allows you to query material numbers. This script (an early version of it) has already been covered in a previous post, but I will talk about it again because I’ve brought new interesting enhancements to it)
• Material Detail I will cover in part 2 (this report allows you to have more detailed information for a given material)

The following two scripts have already been covered:

• List material groups (You can find more information in this post)
• Material stock requirements list (You can find more information in this post)

Last but not least the, the script Material Availability Check is still work in progress and will be part of part 3.

Material reports

As I said, this has already been partly covered in a previous post. However, what I’ve changed now is:

• Made the script a function. I can now query material lists whenever I want
• Made it possible to pass material codes that are numerical and alphanumerical (in the previous version only numerical values were possible). The script will auto detect if the material code is numerical or not.
• The plant code is no longer hard coded but fetched from within SAP in real time.
• Made the code a little faster

Numerical and non numerical values

In the previous version of this script it had been coded in such a way that you could only input numerical values. Passing numerical and non numerical material codes is now possible. This is achieved thanks to a nice PHP function is_numeric. Basically whatever the material number passed the script will check to see if it is numerical or not. If it is, it will append the material number by adding as many zeroes as necessary so as tho have the material number expressed on 18 characters. If it is not a numerical value it will pass the number to the script unaltered. So we have :

• $matnumlength = 18;
• if ( is_numeric($matnrlow) ){
• for ($i = 0 ; $i = ($matnumlength – strlen($matnrlow)) ; $i++) {
• $matnrlow = “0″ . $matnrlow;
• }

Needless to say that you can also mix numerical and alphanumerical values.

You can query numerical values

Or mix types.

Making the code faster

I have no scientific proof to go with that statement, it’s just my impression that execution is improved. What I’ve done is to add supplementary statements in the ‘table_append’ section of the script. It now looks like this:

• saprfc_table_append ($fce,”MATNRSELECTION”, array
• (“SIGN”=>”I”,”OPTION”=>”BT”,”MATNR_LOW”=>$matnrlow,”MATNR_HIGH”=>$matnrhigh));
• saprfc_table_append ($fce,”MATERIALSHORTDESCSEL”, array
• (“SIGN”=>”E”,”OPTION”=>”CP”,”DESCR_LOW”=>”*”,”DESCR_HIGH”=>”"));
• saprfc_table_append ($fce,”PLANTSELECTION”, array
• (“SIGN”=>”I”,”OPTION”=>”EQ”,”PLANT_LOW”=>$plant,”PLANT_HIGH”=>$plant));

Basically I’ve added the

TUFURVJJQUxTSE9SVERFU0NTRUw=

table and I’ve added the

UExBTlRfSElHSA==

parameter to the

UExBTlRTRUxFQ1RJT04=

table.

Retrieving the plant code dynamically

The enhancement here is that the plant code is now retrieved dynamically from SAP. In my previous post I said that it could be retrieved from a MySQL database…but not everybody uses or wishes to use a database to store that information (especially considering that SAP has that information). Now I do not know of a function that allows to query specifically the plant code so I’ve had to resort to the function

UkZDX1JFQURfVEFCTEU=

(and before I get flamed for this, yes I know I should not use it – read OSS note 382318).
In SAP the plant code is stored in a table

VDAwMVc=

. If I use the function

UkZDX1JFQURfVEFCTEU=

in SAP and query the table

VDAwMVc=

we have.

Query the table:


And the result:

What we are interested in retrieving is the plant code and the plant description. The plant code we want because that is what we need to pass to the various BAPI’s and FM’s we are using and the plant description we want so as to build a select list that the user can better understand (but that could be changed).

So we have the following to query table

VDAwMVc=

:

• saprfc_import ($fce,”QUERY_TABLE”,”T001W”);
• saprfc_import ($fce,”DELIMITER”,”/”);

And we return the following to build a select list with the plant code and description:

• $rfc_rc = saprfc_call_and_receive ($fce);
• if ($rfc_rc != SAPRFC_OK) { if ($rfc == SAPRFC_EXCEPTION ) echo (“Exception raised: “.saprfc_exception($fce)); else echo (saprfc_error($fce)); exit; }
• $data_row = saprfc_table_rows ($fce,”DATA”);
• for($i=1; $i<=$data_row ; $i++){
• $DATA = saprfc_table_read ($fce,”DATA”,$i);
• $plantinfo = SPLIT(“/”,$DATA['WA']);
• $plantcode = $plantinfo[1]; // This is the plant code
• $plantname = $plantinfo[2]; // This is the plant description

In our script we have a nice list of plants that are valid in SAP!
.

Making a function file

At this point, I should also mention that one of the things I’ve changed here is to build a functions file. Literally, a file in which I will store all the functions that I will call upon, on a recurring basis. For example, say I need to to retrieve the plant code in 10 of my scripts, why copy/paste the same code 10 times when you can code the function once and make a call to it 10 times – makes sense right! All I have to do then is to call them by referencing them like

ZnVuY3Rpb24gZG9fdGhlX2Zvbw==

(). So easy, why did I not think of it sooner.

The code & feedback

As usual, the code is released under Creative Commons License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I should maybe also mention that these tests have been made using an HP (Compaq nc6220) laptop running on MS Windows XP Pro, the Apache server version 1.3.33 and the PHP scripting engine in version 4.3.10 and of course the SAPRfc library (the Apache/PHP install was that installed via the EasyPhp package). SAP side I was using SAP ERP ECC (ERP Central Component) 5.0.

Some code

You can grab my

cmVhZF9wbGFudF9jb2RlKCk=

function here. If you can improve on this code (which should not be too difficult), give back to the community and post your findings. Comments and suggestions are also very welcome.

If you want the complete codes to date with the images, then drop a comment at the bottom of this post (don’t use the contact page for that). You can safely leave your mail in the intended field as it will not be published .

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