DI Server, DI API, B1WSDetails & Methodologies

Product Head, InSync Solutions

Abhishek is the Product Head for InSync’s product : APPSeConnect. an integration platform connecting Ecommerce and ERP. He is also a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev since 2011, C#, WPF and Azure Insiders and an author of a number of books. He is a renowned public speaker and technology buff. He holds a Masters degree in Computers along with various other certificates.

Twitter : @abhi2434

Email : abhishek.s@insync.co.in

Abhishek SurPresented by

A Product Company making eCommerce Businesses more efficient through their product - “APPSeCONNECT”, which integrates E-Commerce stores withback-office ERP Systems.

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SAP B1 is one of the best and widely accepted backend ERP systems Gives lot of option to the developers as well as the users to use it Smoothly integrates with other applications as and when required.

SAP B1

Different techniques through which Third Party Systems Integration with SAP Business One usually happens.

Third Party Systems Integration withSAP Business One

Difference between

DI API, BI WS and DI Server

As per SAP B1, there are mainly two types of interfaces supported to interact with each other.

DI API to directly interact with COM interfaces and objects supported by SAP B1.

SAP DI Server uses standard SOAP protocol messages to interact data using COM interfaces.

BI WS is a wrapper to SAP DI Server and exposes SOAP messages through IIS.

What Is SAP B1 DI Server?SAP B1 provides a number of endpoints which can help people to integrate their applications with it.

DI or Data Interface Server API enables business partners to develop SOAP based solutions over the Data infrastructure to do CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update & Delete) over the database objects without handling the database objects manually.

• The DI Server is a COM based service which gets automatically installed into the server (with SAP installation). It receives SOAP request messages from client using the Interact method. The DI server converts the SOAP messages into data objects for SAP B1 database. The SOAP messages must be uTF 16 encoded which SAP D1 understands. On the contrary, the DI Server wraps the response data and sends it to the client as SOAP response using the Interact method return value. DI Server also uses Licensing server to validate every request.

Licence

Advantages of SAP B1 DI Server Interfaces

Many of you might have tried to use DI API to communicate SAP B1. The SAP B1 DI Server implementation is recommended to the users for the following benefit.

Heavy duty operations supported and read / write in Batch. Hence gives high performance.

Supports parallel transactions.

Bypasses calls to the Web methods configured in IIS and uses COM element to interact with Data Interface Service directly.

Even though DI API works fine, it is very slow and works as a per call basis.

DEMO

DI API

• Application directly takes reference to the functionalities and sends data according to the API provided by SAP.

• As there is no standard maintained on input and output data, the data is more specific and also gives specific output related to call. 

• Here the SAPBobsCOM.dll is used to reference the business objects exposed through SAP B1.

Advantages: COM interfacing and support of debugging Specific handling of objects uniquely exposed through

API Easy to implement

Limitations Very slow in processing as it requires Serialization /

Deserialization of objects Single channel communication. Batch processing is not supported.

DI API

DEMO

B1 WS

The B1 WS uses IIS with a predefined HttpHandler installed with SAP called BIWSHttpHandler. This handler redirects every interaction endpoints and you can use WsdlServiceGenerator to generate proxy Wsdl over the IIS.

The IIS uses BIWSHttpHandler to interact to the DI Service. You can think of thisHttpHandler as an interface between the COM APIs supported by DI Server which will validate the requests and send to the Database backend.

Advantages:  Standard Protocol (HTTP) interaction supported. Can be accessed from anywhere even from outside if

standard http protocol port is exempted from firewall.

Limitations Need to maintain IIS hosting.

B1 WS

Questions…

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