BAPIs, RFCs, Function Modules, oh my


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BAPIs, RFCs, Function Modules, oh my

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BAPIs, RFCs, Function Modules, oh my - 17 June 2008

joseph@k2.com

Posts: 1
Joined: 17 June 2008
Status: offline

After a week of scouring various resources on the net and in local bookstores and exploring the BAPI function modules using an IQL based interface, I'm still falling short of beginning to make productive use of the ootb (out of the box) BAPIs. I can read and create an employee address, but the buck stops there.

1) Is there some deeper ootb BAPI reference material that discusses the various common parameters, the ranges of arguments they will take and what a particular BAPI might be found useful for in the real world? help.sap.com provides a list of BAPIs with a paragraph to describe each BAPIs purpose, but this doesn't help me identify paramaters and their possible values, nor does it help me see relationships between various BAPIs

2) Are the ootb BAPIs meant to be useful at all? Perhaps they are intended to be examples so custom BAPI developers have a spring board to work from.

3) Why isn't there more discussion on the internet of using the ootb BAPIs from outside sources? Of the SAP documentation and discussions I have found on BAPIs at least 98% has purely to do with creating them as opposed to using them. The 2% usually deals with the syntax of calling the BAPIs from a particular platform and doesn't get into the data types or parameter value ranges.

4) Is the fact that I don't have access to SAPs BAPI Explorer or other interfaces the cause of all of my heartache?

5) Without documentation that ties the SAP tables back to the existing BAPIs I'm unsure of where to look in "Tables Explorer for SAP R/3" to confirm missing data when I receive the message "No Data Store" from an ootb BAPI. Do you have any hints on what this error message means or how to dig into the BAPI from the outside as to determine what tables it is touching?

6) In reading about the HR BAPIs and especially hoping to interface or fire off workflows from the ootb BAPIs I have discovered infotypes, but am not finding a "rest of the technology world" analogy for an infotype. Assuming that it is an object oriented type that can be passed into one of the BAPIs, should I be looking for an initial BAPI to build up the infotype in the db and then call another BAPI that takes the infotypes ID and executes an event or ...?

Thanks for your attention and help,