Design customized webtransaction with Netweaver

Question

I'm working at a client who is planning to design Design a customized web solution for service management, using SAP Netweaver technology  and Enterprise portal.
Simple custom webtransactions need to be designed for creating a service notification by a third party service organisation on the web. The custom web transaction needs to use SAP R/3 master data for lookup/ validation (such as material, BOM, serial master data). This master data resides in SAP enterprise (r/3)
Then,after submitting a notification from the web this needs to trigger a transaction in SAP Enterprise eg IW511- create notification).
We are looking for the best technology to use to come up with a custom design (BAPI, RFC, Idoc etc)
Critical part is how to get data from SAP with best performance results. The master data tables in SAP Enterprise are large and might not be indexed on required fields.

Answer 1

Hello Adrienne,
here is what I would recommend:
As you mentioned, your app needs to look up against material, BOM, serial master /equipment (depending if you just serialize materials or create equipment records as well).
To do this, you will need to find what RFC/BAPI support search functionality against these objects.  If you find an RFC or BAPI method, then we can wrap it with a web service.  If not, or if the search capabilities are not deep enough, I would recommend writing an RFC for this.
Now, you are absolutely right that the tables may not be properly indexed, but, here is a little trick...
You can leverage matchcodes.  When you define the search matchcodes against these objects in R/3, the system creates the underlying tables that are indexed based on the structure of the search criteria defined in the matchcode definition.  The tables, if I recall correclty, are named MCxxx, where xxx is the matchcode object.  Once you localized these tables, you can write an RFC that would search accordingly.  But, for performance and network traffic reasons, do not allow unqualified searches, and additionally, limit the number of returned records (as these can be VERY large).  Once you have the RFCs, create a Web service (either through SAP WAS or XI - WAS would be preferrable due to better performance).  Once you have your data in good shape, you will need to find an RFC/BAPI/IDOC to create notification, wrap it with a service and you should be good to go.
Hope this helps.  John Conte