XI: IDOC bundling - the "trick" with the occurance change

[MichalKrawczyk]

When we use Exchange Infrastructure for sending IDOCs to our R/3 system
(which still is one of the most popular data exchange formats with the R/3)
very often we come to a point when we'd like to post many IDOCs from just one message.
It can be a file which should be mapped to multiple IDOCs or a select query
from a database which also maps to several (if not several hundreds) IDOCs.

Basicly we have 2 ways of handling such scenarios:

- we can use a block step and send multiple IDOCs from our BPM

- we can also do a little trick and send multiple IDOCs from the XI without a BPM

The first approach is a standard XI approach. It involves the use of a BPM
so the speed of this transfer many not be very good in case you'd like to send
hundreds or thousands of IDOCs in just one call.

The second approach uses a little trick that was mentioned several times
on the Process Integration (PI) & SOA Middleware by a number of XI developers but is still not very clear to the XI newbies.
It allows us to send multiple IDOCs without the use of a BPM. Most probably this will be your choice
if you'd like to use such 1:N (IDOCs) scenarios effectively.

In this weblog I'll describe the second approach:

Step 1

- at first you have to import your IDOC definition from your R/3

Step 2

- as you know this IDOC definition that you've just imported allows the mapping of only one IDOC

- in order to change this you have to export the IDOC definition to an XSD file

Step 3

- now we can change the occurance of the IDOC segment so it will allow many
IDOC segments - you can do it by specifying the IDOC segment occurance
in the same way all multiple IDOC segments are described



- or you can set the occurance to unbounded - like we can specify with any data type that we create within the XI



Step 4

- then we have to import the IDOC definition again as the "External definition"

Step 5

- create a mapping from you source message type to the created external IDOC definition

- as you can see the IDOC occurance is not 1..1 anymore



Step 6

- create an interface mapping that will use your new message mapping

- specify the source and the target of this interface mapping as the standard IDOC

Step 7

- create your scenario inside Integration Directory and while specyfinig the Interface determination
remember to use your new Interface mapping

While testing your new scenario you should be able to see that the occurance of the IDOC segment is not 1..1 anymore.



This weblog show an alternative way of sending IDOCs through the XI
which was widely discussed on the XI forum but hopefuly now it will be a little bit more clear.

Tested on: XI 3.0 SP14