Using the SAP Password BAPIs
By Thomas Schuessler
Many users of your SAP-enabled web applications will be people who do not
have named SAP userids, either because they are employees who do not require
constant access to SAP or because they are business partners. So your
applications will use a generic userid (or several). In many applications,
though, you require a userid/password mechanism that guarantees that only
authorized persons can access the functionality. Assuming that you do not
want to buy a named userid for each of your employees and business partners,
what can you do to deal with this requirement?
While you could implement the required mechanism yourself (outside of SAP),
it is probably faster and easier to use the password BAPIs that SAP provides
for the object types Employee, Customer, Vendor, Applicant, and
BusPartnerEmployee. (There are some additional object types with password
BAPIs but they are either obsolete or have incomplete password
functionality.) These object types have a set of BAPIs that allow you to
create object type-specific userids and passwords and manipulate and check
them.
In SAPGUI, you can use transaction code SU05 to maintain these userids.
A normal application will at least need to check th
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e password that a user
enters and may also let the user change the password. A more sophisticated
application might even enforce a periodic password change.
An administrator application (as an easy-to-use alternative to SU05) must be
able to create, delete, and lock userids, re-initialize the password (in
case the user has forgotten it), and check the status of a userid.
The SAP password BAPIs allow you to do all these things, without you having
to worry about a separate database, password encryption et cetera.
If you want to save some time in getting up to speed with these BAPIs, read
my article "Password Management for Extranet Applications" in the
July/August issue of the SAP Professional Journal (www.sappro.com).
And if you are using the SAP Java Connector (JCo) for your applications (the
best BAPI middleware I am aware of) then you can even save more time: I have
developed a Java component that encapsulates access to the password BAPIs
and allows you to manipulate the userids and passwords with a few lines of
code. Contact me (tgs@arasoft.de or thomas.schuessler@sap.com) if you want
to receive an evaluation copy.
Thomas G. Schuessler, www.arasoft.de
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