Expose Your RFC over HTTP

Posted on 13 Oct. 2009 at 1.30 PM, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Web services over SOAP/HTTP are getting more popular nowadays as a means of integration among IT systems. However, the classic HTTP protocol is still very commonly used in many companies, and in some cases, it may be the only protocol supported by their hardware systems. So, How do you go about it in SAP if you need to expose your RFC over HTTP?

Unfortunately until today, SAP does not create any readily available tool to help user to expose RFC over HTTP within minutes. You need to do some programming yourself to achieve it. What do you need to do?

• Create ABAP class and implement method HANDLE_REQUEST from interface IF_HTTP_EXTENSION
  • For every incoming HTTP request, a 'server control block' is made available to the handler method in the form of a CL_HTTP_SERVER object. This object has two significant attributes, one of which is the HTTP request object (REQUEST), and the other is HTTP response object (RESPONSE).
• Create and activate HTTP service tree and place the ABAP class you have created from the previous step in the handler list
• Try out the service and making an HTTP call from another HTTP program or tool

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