Explaining Web Services and Java APIs

SAP Convergent Charging offers a set of APIs to control the system. As the following graphic shows, the web services and the java-based APIs are exposing services provided by the updater and dispatcher instances. The web services are mainly used by the SAP standard integration between SAP Convergent Charging and SAP Subscription Order Management / SAP Convergent Invoicing. However, you can also use them from other systems as long as only read operations are executed. When writing with these services make sure that no lost updates can happen due to race conditions between communication partners writing the same data.

SAP Convergent Charging web services are technical interfaces dedicated to the integration of SAP Convergent Charging with an order and contract management system like SAP Subscription Order Management or with a billing system like SAP Convergent Invoicing. Use this technical interface if you want to manage master data stored in SAP Convergent Charging or if you want to perform operations such as charging.

A prerequisite for the integration is to define the pricing logic and the charging rules in SAP Convergent Charging.

The standard integration of SAP Convergent Charging with an order and contract management system can be split into three stages:

• The definition of the commercial product and its catalog: In the SAP Subscription Order Management application, you combine the charge plans defined in SAP Convergent Charging to set up your commercial product and its catalog of marketable services. Optionally, you can customize the pricing information configured in SAP Convergent Charging by enriching and maintaining some master data in a pricing catalog owned by the service provider.
• The customer data provisioning in SAP Convergent Charging from SAP Subscription Order Management with their accounts, which can be prepaid or external. Notice that external accounts are linked to the postpaid accounts managed by the invoicing system.
• The provisioning of pricing and charging information in contracts stored in SAP Convergent Charging from SAP Subscription Order Management.

The SAP Convergent Charging web services follow the SOAP standard. With SAP Convergent Charging 2022, some additional web services were introduced following the REST standard.

The following diagram provides an overview of the available SOAP Web Services:

The following diagram provides an overview of the available REST Web Services:

In addition to the web services SAP Convergent Charging provides, Java APIs to enable programmers to implement global business services provided by SAP Convergent Charging. The business or technical services are designed and developed on the Message TCP or on the HTTP Communication Interface (HCI) technical interfaces. While the Message TCP protocol is optimized for low overhead and short response times and is thus not human readable, the HCI interface is based on an xml payload that is transmitted via an http message.

According to the business requirements and the architecture of the system landscape, SAP Convergent Charging provides several Java API services in the following areas: