XI: RFC or ABAP Proxy ? ....ABAP Proxies with attachments

[MichalKrawczyk]

There have been many discussions on the XI forum regarding the advantages
of using ABAP Proxy protocol over the RFC protocol. In this weblog I will not provide you
with a direct answer which protocol you should use. Instead I will show how you can use
the new protocol's function of sending attachments together with the message payload.

Let's imagine we have to send an invoice (in XML) from our R/3 or ERP system.
If this was our only requirement then we could easily consider using either RFC
or ABAP Proxy communication as in both cases messages will be transfered to XML in the XI
but what if we also have to send the same invoice as a jpg file (or PDF) together
with the XML message and send it in the mail (using mail adapter)? What can we do then?
Is there a simple way of doing it? It turns out that there is 🙂 Since ABAP Proxy protocol
sends a SOAP message we can include the jpg file as an SOAP attachment.

Below you'll find a code sample that executes a proxy call to the XI. Together with the XML message
we're sending a jpg file in the attachment.

DATA: prxy TYPE REF TO zco_proxy_test_out,      attachment_protocol TYPE REF TO      if_wsprotocol_attachments,      attachment          TYPE REF TO if_ai_attachment,      attachments         TYPE prx_attach,      attach_xstring      TYPE xstring.DATA:    begin of itab occurs 0,         raw(255) type x,         end of itab.DATA: it TYPE  ZSOURCE_MT.CREATE OBJECT prxy.CALL FUNCTION 'GUI_UPLOAD'     exporting       filetype =  'BIN'       filename = 'C:\test.jpg'     tables       data_tab = itab.LOOP AT itab.  CONCATENATE attach_xstring itab-raw INTO attach_xstring  IN BYTE MODE.ENDLOOP.TRY.*get attachment protocol  attachment_protocol ?= prxy->get_protocol(if_wsprotocol=>attachments ).attachment = attachment_protocol->GET_ATTACHMENT_FROM_BINARY(      data = attach_xstring      type = if_ai_attachment=>C_MIMETYPE_JPEG      name = 'michal_attachment' ).    APPEND attachment TO attachments.attachment_protocol->set_attachments( attachments ).it-SOURCE_MT-from = 'michal'.it-SOURCE_MT-to = 'krawczyk'.CALL METHOD prxy->execute_asynchronous     EXPORTING        output = it.COMMIT WORK.  CATCH cx_ai_system_fault .    DATA fault TYPE REF TO cx_ai_system_fault .    CREATE OBJECT fault.    WRITE <li-emoji id="lia_confused-face" title=":confused_face:"></li-emoji> fault->errortext.ENDTRY.

Now when we post this message we will see both parts in the XI - the XML payload and the attachment part of the SOAP message.



If we want to include the jpg file inside the e-mail message all we have to do is to check the "keep attachments" indicator.



When we test our flow we will see the jpg attachment in the e-mail message.



As you can see the jpg file has content-id name but you can easily change it inside the adapter module
of the mail adapter for example so that it can have the attachment's name name.

I believe that the scenario I've described above could also be done with RFC protocol somehow
but I'm pretty sure we'd have to do a lot more coding to achive the same so why not use the new XI's possibilities?