access denied

[ibearian]

I have just joined an sec listed company that uses SAP r/3 but does not allow ODBC access (sox 303) to to the DB or the use of report painter or BW. I am an accountant but do loads of VB, SQL coding and crytals reports and i just can't find a way to get data out of sap other than using the excel adins which is just so minimal.

I feel like i have fallen in a wormhole and appreared in 1990 !

Any ideas, any products, any thing

 

[bbrendan]

you cannot access SAP tables via odbc.

use the SAP .net connector

look on SAP for this.

Its an addin that allows you to make BAPI calls, ie: query some of the tables like customer master and material master.
if you look in SAP
run TCode BAPI and you will see all the BAPI's you can run.

Also you can do direct table querys via this.

please note: there is a .net 2.0 connector that works only on vb2003 not vb2005

you need to convert the connector in vb2003 to work for vb2005. pretty easy. look for a document on SAP to convert

enjoy!

 

[ibearian]

many thanks

 

[bbrendan]

also,

what about using SAP Query or Quick Query (SQ01)

you could write custom reports (info sets)

save them and run as a batch job via SM36

other ideas!

cheers

 

[Kerrymr]

Can you explain how the Sm36 and the Sq01 thing works?

I can create the query and i can schedule a batch job but cannot figure out how to export the query to a server location.

Can you please provide some details as to what steps need to be taken to make this work?

Thanks in advance,
Kerry

 

[bbrendan]

Its not very straightforward!. I have been down this road before. Wanting to build a qry and have it run as a background job overnight to extract a report and dump it somewhere.

if you look on sdn.sap.com/forums you will see a number of posts in regards to how to set this up. From what i recall there is a function module that had been built to do this, but it was quite complicated to setup. I havent written any ABAP and dont have access to a developer key to add the code.

Other solutions?. Well what i ended up doing was buying a 3rd party SAP connector called ERPConnect. If you dont mind a little coding in vb.net or c# you can write a small application to call the SAP query and drop the results to a table or a file. Very easy to do. im using it now to pull tables and queries and even calling BAPI'S from SAP into a SQL DB. Their website has some pretty good documentation about how to call SAP data.

Also there is a "SAP" version of this, its called SAP.Net Connector. I found it quite difficult to use, as its only written in C# and you need to port it to VB.net.
Also its only available on vs2003 not vs2005

let me know if you need anything

cheers

 

[Kerrymr]

Here's an interesting solution I a working on.
1. Create Query.
2. Create batch job with automatic email.
3. Create Vb code in Outlook to automatically identify the incoming file, convert the code from HTML to plain CSV text, save the file to a server location.
I have everything so far except the tag stripper for converting the HTML to the plain CSV text.

Maybe thats the "roundabout way" you alluded to.
Theoretically it will work...

Regards,
Kerry

 

[bbrendan]

that would rely on you having outlook running all the time.

since outlook is only a "mail client" if for example you were on holidays, the mail sent from SAP would sit in your mail server until you returned and opened outlook. Which would then action your code..

if you canb code in VB, i would suggest spending the $$ to buy the SAP connector i eluded to. i can give you some code to show you how to pull the report into a db table of to a file.

you could setup the vb app as either a service or a batchjob that runs anytime, extracting the data as required...

anyway.. yes your solution might work, just has some dependancy on user interaction

cheers