sap bapis and hp oo

Couple quick notes:

• SAP is not designed for automated / programmatic access – their “BAPI”, or binary application programming interface, requires additional licensing beyond just the product to use
  • I made the naive assumption that a “BAPI” was like a WSDL – and it is, but it’s proprietary, not open (and it’s binary, not plaintext XML)
• HP Operations Orchestration requires an additional, ie not out-of-the-box, content pack and wizard to import SAP BAPIs to make operations

That said, the power of OO can be brought to bear with SAP and imported BAPIs – with the following gotchas:

• You can only have one BAPI call in a given flow
• If you want to call more than one BAPI for a given task, you need to have them split into their own subflows, and call the subflows

Hopefully you won’t need to know this. But if you do, I’m happy to save you some of the headaches I have experienced interoperating with SAP & OO.