Building and Monitoring Outbound Interfaces

Review the following steps and diagram for an asynchronous outbound interface:

1. Generate an ABAP proxy from a service interface.
   • As a prerequisite to creating an SAP Application Interface Framework interface for an outbound proxy, you need a service interface. The service interface is created in the ESR or MDR and is usually not the task of the SAP Application Interface Framework interface developer.
   • For this service interface, an outbound proxy class has to be generated in the back end system.
2. Create the source structure.
   • Another prerequisite is the source structure. You have to create this structure. What the structure should look like depends on the data that is available at the triggering place and that needs to be passed to SAP Application Interface Framework.
   • You should consider that you do not have to pass all data that you want to be sent out to SAP Application Interface Framework; instead, you can derive the data from other fields within mapping in SAP Application Interface Framework.
3. Create an SAP Application Interface Framework interface, and maintain the proxy class and source structure.
   • You have to specify the name of the outbound proxy class and the record type should then be inserted automatically.
   • Furthermore, you have to specify the SAP structure (source structure).
4. Set the SAP Application Interface Framework application and persistence engines to XML.
   • SAP Application Interface Framework always displays the source data in Monitoring and Error Handling. However, this data is not usually stored anywhere for outbound proxy interfaces. Therefore, we use SAP Application Interface Framework’s own persistence and runtime in order to enable the display of data and reprocessing and canceling of messages.
   • Set the application and persistence engines to XML.
5. Create a structure mapping, value mappings, actions, and so on for the interface.
   • The rest of the implementation can then be done in SAP Application Interface Framework Customizing.
   • You can create structure mappings, value mappings, actions, and so on as for any other SAP Application Interface Framework interface.
6. Create a report or a function module to trigger the sending of a message. Call the /AIF/SEND_WITH_PROXy function module to pass the data to SAP Application Interface Framework and to send the message.
   • Pass the necessary data to the interfaces source structure, and call the /AIF/SEND_WITH_PROXY function module.
   • Make sure to pass the correct namespace, interface name, and version to the function module. Furthermore, you have to pass the source data.