BAPI business objects support certain operations and verbs. An operation reflects the operation to be performed on the business object by the adapter. The verb of the business object reflects its state and is defined at the business graph level for after-image objects only.
The operation of a BAPI business object specifies the BAPI call to execute in the SAP system for that object. The SAP JCo APIs are used to make the call to the SAP software system. The operation is given meaning by the BAPI method. In other words, a BAPI call has inherent functionality, independent of the operation associated with it.
Operations of a business object are invoked by the SCA client component that makes calls to SAP via the adapter.
Then following table defines operations that the adapter supports. Note that these are the expected uses for the operations. The action taken in the SAP application is based on the meaning of the BAPI itself.
Operation | Definition |
---|---|
After-Image Create | Creates a new entity in SAP that matches the data and structure of the input business object. The business object returned by this operation should accurately reflect the newly created entity in SAP. |
After-Image Update with Delete | A special form of the UpdateWithDelete operation that provides better performance. It always requires a ChangeSummary, which is expected to include information about business object-level creations and deletions. This enables the adapter to perform operations without the overhead of retrieving the existing entities from SAP and doing comparisons since the ChangeSummary indicates what needs to be done. If the ChangeSummary is empty, the adapter does not take any action on the request. |
Retrieve | Rebuilds the complete business object hierarchy. The adapter ensures
that the returned hierarchical business object exactly matches the database
state of the application entity. Non-key values can be used as criteria. Accepts either an after-image or business object. The comparison in either case will be by equality only. The request business object might contain any of the following: Retrieve is intended to return a single, unique business object that meets user-defined criteria. The requirement for performing the retrieve is totally dependent on the BAPI. Whatever the BAPI deems as “required” is what allows the retrieve to be successful. |
After-Image Delete | Removes an existing entity from SAP and any contained child entities. Note that SAP has the concept of a logical delete, whereby the record is marked as deleted but the entity still exists. This is done in some cases to maintain database integrity because the entity “deleted” is referenced in other entities. Therefore, After-Image Delete behavior depends on the BAPI call. |
For an operation that is not supported or does not match with the verb in the business graph, the adapter logs the appropriate error and produces a ResourceException.
The verb of a BAPI business object specifies the state of the object. The following table lists the verbs that the adapter supports for BAPI business objects.
Verb | Definition |
---|---|
Create | The top-level business object and all contained children has been created, if this is an inbound event, or should be created in the EIS, if this is an outbound request. |
UpdateWithDelete | The top-level business object has been or should be modified; this may include addition or deletion of children as well. |
Delete | The top-level business object and any contained children have been or should be deleted. |
For verbs that are not supported, the adapter produces a ResourceException error.
Last updated: Sun Mar 12 11:15:18 2006
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