Is it bye bye to SAP standard enterprise services? With no way to enhance in NWDS

[Former Member]

Hi all,

This is just a warning to all fans of the standard SAP enterprise services. I am beginning to suspect that there are not that many of us :sad: , but I will keep hope alive. One of these days, I hope to see a statistic for how many standard SAP enterprise services that are used in a large pool of productive PI/PO landscapes. How high do you think the percentage will be in average? From my own experience, I am beginning to suspect the number is concerning low.

How many do you use the productive environment you work with? Actual raw untouched SAP standard enterprise services? When I take a look myself, I see 31 out of 259 unique Integrated Configuration interactions. Close to 12%. Is that a high or low percentage!? Either way, I hope SAP will not make it harder to push the number upwards by removing features and options supporting SAP standard.

However, that hope got yet another setback (see my blog about the lack of modelling option in the PO single stack) when I saw that the enhancement feature is not part of the NWDS ESR workbench.

Enhancement defined in Spring ESR:

Added to Enterprise Service:

Mapping in Spring ESR:

Mapping in NWDS ESR (note: no context menu for enhancements exist):

This means that not only do we have no way of creating enhancements to existing data types directly in the NWDS ESR. Additionally, if we want to work in NWDS ESR then we also have to live with the following:

1) we cannot see existing enhancement definitions in NWDS ESR

2) existing enhancement mappings disappear when opening the message mapping in NWDS ESR

3) existing enhancements used in message mappings are not included in the output of the new feature "Export to spreadsheet". (A feature I, otherwise, am a big fan of)

On a related topic: I have also found that enhancements disappear when you import operation mappings with enhanced data types into BPM.

The good news is, that BPM can support imported services with enhancements. I have tried updating the service definition after importing the operation mapping in BPM, which does update the data type definition, so you can see the enhancement in the BPM Output Mapping configuration, but the mapping steps fails to be deployed correctly after doing this. So I suspect that operation mappings which include enhancements to the data types within BPM is also a no-no.

My overall concern is, that SAP is making it impossible to (convince business/clients to) use SAP standard enterprise services if we (developers) are not given the possibility of enhancing these. I have found that most customers still have a few custom developed stuff, that they want included in their integrations.

I also mention this because I am now begining to meet the first "generation" of PI developers who have exclusively developed PI in NWDS only. How can SAP expect these new developers to embrace SAP standard enterprise services with the limitation described above?

Of course I should consider the very likely possibility, that I got it all wrong, and that it is or will become SAP's recommendation that we start building all/any service from scratch? Always. Hmmm, I can still feel that hope-thingy.

I have currently working on Netweaver PO 7.4 SP9 single stack.

Have a good one, Emil