I am creating a Web application that will issue an RFC call to SAP to execute a function module to read selected tables based on the data that was passed. We plan to create the application using Java. Can the selected data be returned in XML format? I know that Business Connector can handle this but this will be a real-time inquiry.
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Depending on the type of application you are building, your XML document requirements can be extremely simple or horrendous. If you need to model a complex set of table relationships via XML, then Business Connector is the way to go. It can operate realtime and offers a more abstracted development interface than JCo.
On the other hand, if you need to simply model a table subset in XML, I recommend coding this manually in the Java application. This means declaring a document type definition containing the required field elements, and then either rendering the plaintext XML document or passing the document over a network or file stream (HTTP, etc.). Again, the implementation of XML is highly dependent on your requirements, but these are two common options when dealing with XML.
This was first published in November 2002