About

This article gives an overview how and when SAP connections are used in tia® Document Router.

Content

Introduction

SAP-Connection may required in two occasions:

• Archiving

• Linking

The following sections will explain the work and usage of sap connections in tia® Document Router.

SAP Connector Plugin

tia® Document Router is delivered with KGS SAP Connector plugin. It can be reached by OSGI UI: Main → KGS SAP Connector.

There SAP-Connections can be configured.

These connections are primarily used for SAP-Linking.

In Document Router instance configuration in tab common an SAPALinkInterface can be defined. Only if this setting is set to ArchiveLink, then also the SAP Connector plugin is used in order to generate Archive URLs in order to communicate with an Archive Link archive system. In other setting of the parameter SAPALinkInterface the SAP connection configured in SAP Connector plugin is not used for archiving.

SAP Connections for archiving

In Document Router instance configuration in tab common, the SAPALinkInterface can be chosen.

1. ArchiveLink

2. SAPALink

3. KGS External API

The following sub chapters are describing the possibilities.

SAP SNC Configuration

https://kgs-software.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/WIKI/pages/2551971858

ArchiveLink

In Document Router SAP tab defined SAP connector connection is used.

While archiving Document Router requests an Archive URL via RFC connection from connected SAP-System. This URL may signed as well.

The advantage is, that the content server has not to be configured second time in Document Router. In addition no certificate for archiving needs to be installed.

The disadvantage is that annother round trip time to SAP-Archive is required. Is the SAP-System off site this will cause perfomance drwa backs.

Another disadvantage is early locking. It is not possible to suppress locking while archiving because Document Router does not know which content server is configured in SAP. Further it is not possible to realize late locking because we don’t get feedback if early locking was done and if it was successfully.

SAPALink

For archiving the connection configured in tab SAP in Document Router instance is irrelevant.

In order to configure SAPALink the web.xml file needs to be configured inside Tomcat webapps folder.

In order to use it, please consult: FAQ: SAPALink Implementation

This possibility is much more flexible. So for example it is possible to archive to an S3 archive. tia® Document Router behaves like an inbuilt tia® Content Server and can archive so to a brad variety of storage systems.

KGS External API

Like in case of ArchiveLink the communication is using the ArchiveLink protocol. In comparison to option ArchiveLink the required URLs for archiving/locking are not created by SAP. Instead an own implentation is used for creating ArchiveLink URLs. According ArchiveLink Spezifikation it is possible to sign the URL. Using security level 2 the inbuild certificate needs to be placed into content server. The document router does not offer such an possibility. Instead you can use tia® Migration.

KGS External API is respecting AL Connection Mapping File which can be configured in Document Router instance configuation in tab Archiving. This offers and index file dependent archive mapping.

SAP Connections for Linking

In SAP connector plugin are SAP connections configured.

In document router instance config in tab SAP via configuration item SAPConnection, a default SAP connection is chosen. (Can be overwritten by index file → DR4 - Defining DataInterfaces, SIDMappings and Archive Link Mappings | SIDMapping definition )

In schema file (as constant) or in index file an content repository is set.

With these information in addition to SAP-Object-Id and document ID are enough information for linking an document archive to content server to an SAP-Object.

Please respect that you need to set BCSAPLinkObject to Link to business object.