Integration of OData in AIF & Monitoring in AIF

December 24, 2022
Sara Sampaio
Technical Articles

The SAP Application Interface Framework enables you to develop and monitor interfaces as well as execute error handling in a single framework residing in your SAP back end system.

It enables you to monitor interfaces across technologies centrally and configure alerts for the errors, mass error handling, and most importantly, empower business users. If there are any errors that are business related and non-technical, your business user can fix the error without involving IT. Moreover, you can develop small configurable components that can be reused across different interfaces and technologies. This can save you a lot of time if you have similar scenarios across multiple interfaces; which helps in multi-technology framework.

Most common use-cases are as below:

You have a complex, heterogeneous system landscape
You want to decouple technical and business aspects of your interfaces, thus enabling business users to perform error handling
You use different technologies to implement interfaces, so you have duplicate efforts for implementing the same logic in multiple technologies
You must use multiple monitoring tools for different basis technologies and would like to use one tool to simplify the monitoring and error handling
You experience difficulties in enforcing interface implementation guidelines
You need to restrict access to interface data to fulfil your regulatory or company compliance rules

This blog will be focused on the configuration of SAP Application Interface Framework to supports the monitoring of error messages for OData services. For erroneous data messages, you can display the error messages and the content of the data message in the source format. Correcting the contents of the data messages, restarting, or cancelling data messages of the OData service using the SAP Application Interface Framework is not yet supported.

This blog will share step by step documentation on activating/ integration of Odata messages in AIF.
Pre-requisite:
1. You must be on S4 Hana system
2. Have AIF License of custom creation

Assumption:

You already have a namespace and an interface created. If note, please follow below steps:
- Creation of Namespace:
  - Navigate to IMG activity SAP Application Interface Framework Interface Development Define Namespace.
  - Change from display to edit mode.
  - Choose New Entries and create a new entry (enter a name and description).
  - Save the new entry.
- Creation of Interface:
  - Navigate to IMG activity SAP Application Interface Framework Interface Development Define Interfaces.
  - Enter the name of the AIF namespace created before.
  - Create a new entry. Specify the parameters for interface development.
  - Save the AIF interface.
You already have an Odata Service created.

Step 1: Create an interface with a raw structure

- Create a RAW structure to get the data from Odata into AIF
  Go to Tcode SE11 -> Create a structure – ZAIF_ODATA_ROOT_STRUC, which will at least have acomponent of type /AIF/ODATA_STD_RAW_FLDS_S and a table type that will contain Odata structure.
- Create a interface
  Go to Tcode /AIF/CUST -> Interface Development -> Define Interface

Step2: For the OData interface, specify the interface engines as below:

Step 3: Specify the OData services and elements, for example entity sets, whose error logs you want to monitor using this interface. the services in Customizing of SAP Application Interface Framework under

Interface Development -> Additional Interface Properties -> Define OData Services .

Step 4: Define a message index table that at least includes the structure /AIF/ODATA_STD_IDX_FLDS_S. For an example of such an index table, see the template table /AIF/T_ODATA_IDX.

Add your index table to the OData interface in Customizing of SAP Application Interface Framework, under Error Handling Define Namespace-specific Features Define Interface-specific Features Message Idx Table .

Step 5: To receive up-to-date error logs of OData services in SAP Application Interface Framework, select the services in the program /AIF/ODATA_TRANSFER_JOB and schedule the program to run periodically. You can look up the available oData services in transaction /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE.