.NET connectivity with SAP

Question

I wanted to learn SAP connectivity with .NET. I am 0% in SAP and even I don't have any SAP environment to give it a try. Can you suggest me how can I learn it practically? I mean is there anything exists like SAP express [Just a thought from Visual Studio Express Edition] so that I can create BAPI and see how connectivity is going.

Answer 1

You can start with the book Microsoft .NET and SAP so you became familiar with SAP, ERP concepts and the tools to interconnect .net and SAP. SAP have an API to work with .net, I performed some migrations and web services between .net and SAP in the past, and that book help me. You'll need that sap-connector that you mention as a tag.

To give you more insight about it: SAP it's a complete platform that include the server and software, thats why you need to have something like this as a "connection string"

"ASHOST=AppserverIP SYSNR=sysnumber CLIENT=clientnumber _USER=user PASSWD=password". 

The SAP ERP have a lot of tables with the necessary data to work, all of these table and column names have an specific names like TELF1 for telephone and TELFX for fax. And a lot of columns are localized to German so the date format it's: DD.MM.YYYY be careful with that.

A common application to build it's some service that migrate data from sap to an application or the other way from the custom app to SAP, and you will need to know well the mapped data. This two links may be very useful:

• Using the SAP.NET Connector to Connect your .NET Applications to SAP
• Transferring Data from SAP to .NET using ERPConnect

As a personal experience, I had always worked with existing test instance of SAP ERP wich where later just move to production, so actually I never asked my self about some software provided by SAP for test purpouses, but I dived a little and find this: SAP download section where you can find some trial version of their products.