B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

110 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Source: SAP, AG
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Figure 4.6. — BAPI and RFC enabled integration
RFC-Method Oriented Integration — SAP provides support for remote
function calls (RFCs), which enable synchronous communication between
R/3 and non-SAP systems, or even different modules of the same R/3
system. RFCs hide the implementation details of the function modules
from the external applications and manage the communication process,
error handling and parameter transfer.
IDocs-Data Oriented Integration — SAP provides a mechanism to
exchange data to and from R/3 systems in file formats through
Intermediate documents (IDocs), which act like containers of that data.
This type of integration is asynchronous in nature and is useful for
transferring large amount of data. IDocs contain a header and segments
of data. SAP has defined templates for all the possible IDocs that
represent business documents of R/3 system like purchase orders.
XML-Message Oriented Integration — SAP Business Connector
enables exchange of R/3 system business documents as XML-based
messages with other SAP and non-SAP systems (see Figure 4.7).
Messages are formatted in XML (based on the industry standards