Business object structure

The connector supports three kinds of BAPI business objects: business objects for single BAPI calls, business objects for BAPI transactions, and BAPI ResultSet objects.

Business object structure for single BAPI calls

A business object for a single BAPI call reflects a method on the BAPI interface. The business object uses the BAPI business object handler to map each business object attribute to a BAPI parameter. The connector, each business object, and the BAPI business object handler are metadata-driven. The application-specific information provided in the metadata of each business object and the business object handler allows you to add connector support for a new business object and the business object handler without modifying connector code. Instead:

The business object handler supports both single- and multiple-cardinality relationships between business objects.

A business object based on a BAPI can contain no more than two levels of hierarchy. Therefore, all BAPI simple parameters correspond to attributes of the top-level business object, and BAPI structure and table parameters correspond to child business objects.

Table 10. Correspondence between BAPIs and business objects for SAP
BAPI interface parameter WebSphere business object for SAP
Simple field Attribute of the top-level business object
Structure Single-cardinality child business object
Table Multiple-cardinality child business objects

Note:
Importing and exporting parameters can be simple field or structure parameters.

Figure 48 illustrates the association between a business object and a BAPI. The figure illustrates a fragment of the sap_bapi_salesorder_createfromdat2 business object, which corresponds to the BAPI_SALESORDER_CREATEFROMDAT2 BAPI.

Figure 48. Mapping between a business object and a BAPI

Business object structure for BAPI transactions

A business object representing a BAPI transaction is a wrapper object that contains multiple BAPI objects as children. Each individual child BAPI object within the wrapper BAPI transaction object represents the parameters of a single BAPI call. Note that SAPODA always adds a suffix of _txn to the BAPI transaction object names. For example, sap_BAPI_salesorder_txn.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2004, 2005