Do you have suggestions for naming conventions within AIF?

Question

Hi Folks!
Being new to AIF I'm currently in the information gathering phase for myself and colleagues as we are starting to think about implementing interfaces with the help of this toolbox. I already found and read (or at least skimmed!) through various of your discussions as well as the very helpful blog posts from Verena, Michal and Andrey.
One of the first things we want to do - before we really get started for real - is to come up with some feasible naming conventions for the various customizable bits and pieces like
Namespace
Interface Name
SAP Data Structure (if applicable?)
We also have some general questions:
Does it make sense to prepare for one namespace per SAP-module or is it better to have just one and do the separation on the Interface name "level"?
Is it preferred - even though SAP doesn't seem to enforce this - to start our own names with a "Z"?
Searching SCN for "naming convention aif" didn't find anything related and while scrolling through the discussion forum I also didn't see any titles which might go into this direction. In order for us to not re-invent the wheel - or to start off in the wrong direction - I'm hoping to get some helpful pointers from you.
Thanks much for any feedback you have!
Cheers from Germany
Baerbel

Answer 1

Hi Bärbel,
Your question is very good. We had the same and decided for following own approach:
Namespace
A Namespace is a concatenation of business process and SAP module, e.g. O2C_AR, P2P_AP, P2P_MM, R2R_GL.
We have one global namespace for global objects as checks on currency code, date format value mappings, etc.
Interface NameEvery interface has its own name. To be honest for inbound interface the names are more a user friendly description, for outbound we follow a little rule that they start with OUT_.
SAP Data Structure (if applicable?)
We try to do the structure mapping in the middle-ware and AIF is only responsible for the functional mappings.
The root structure name is different between raw data and SAP data. But the sub structure and field names are equal. Because of this we can use the move corresponding fields or in some only monitoring interfaces even move corresponding structures.
We also have some general questions:
Does it make sense to prepare for one namespace per SAP-module or is it better to have just one and do the separation on the Interface name "level"?Because AIF support and business users differ in different business processes we separated in these processes and modules. In addition the recipients groups are similar to the name spaces.
Is it preferred - even though SAP doesn't seem to enforce this - to start our own names with a "Z"?For namespaces (six characters) and interface names (10 characters) we don’t.
Best wishes
Christoph