Developing an ECC and Domino integrated application

When you are ready to develop an application that integrates ECC with HCL Domino®, it is recomended you involve people that have an excellent working knowledge of ECC and Lotus Domino administration.

In some cases it is fairly easy to write an RFC function that does exactly what your application needs to achieve. ECC experts can help you answer the following questions:
  • How do I get the data that I want?
  • What are the RFC’s or BAPI’s to call?
  • Where is the data stored?
  • How do I run a query to find specific application data?
  • What development at the ECC end can be done to best support the application goal?
When you want to exchange data with ECC, do the following in the listed order:
  1. Find a BAPI. First you should try to find a BAPI that does the job. BAPI’s, once they are released, survive ECC release changes.
  2. Find an RFC function. If you do not find a BAPI for your application, find an RFC function that solves your needs.
  3. Write your own RFC functions. This is your most powerful option.

Transactions

In most cases, writing to ECC is done by executing transactions. However, if you have a BAPI or an RFC that allows you to write to ECC, you should use the BAPI/RFC. Transactions normally allow you to do only one specific task.

For example, each of these transactions performs only one task in processing customer records:

  • XD01 -- Create customer
  • XD02 -- Update customer
  • XD06 -- Mark customer for deletion

Ideally you have one RFC that allows you to perform all three tasks -- again, this can be achieved by writing your own RFC function.

Trace files

The RFC API generates trace files with the name rfcxxxxx_xxxx.trc when the DebugLevel property is set to 1. These contain trace information when calling RFC functions.

Direct transfer with ECC as a source

Access and manipulation of RFC Export data -- When ECC is a source in a Direct Transfer activity, you may elect to have data from the export parameters and structures become part of the result set that is passed onto your data target. When ECC is a target these exports are only available through the LC LSX and the LCConnection method Call. With the current implementation, you must make a call to Call once for each row of data to be moved to ECC. This means no array writing with Call, which can affect performance. Generally, when you write to ECC, you are calling a transaction (Stored Procedure in LEI terms) -- in any case, LEI only supports sending a single row of data to a Stored Procedure. Note that one difference with the LCConnection Call method is that you do not have a Select Statement. You will be required to build up a field list that mirrors what your select statement would have been. See the LotusScript section of this document for an example of this. You can select exports directly when you do field mapping now.