How to check if a system is not down??

Question

Hi All,
I have a requirement in which i have to call a RFC, from a report, which resides in a different system. if the destination system is down at that moment of time then my report program gives short dump.
Please suggest me.. if there is any way or standard function module or anything of the kind to check if the destination system is not down.. so that i may give error message instead of calling the RFC and getting the short dump.
Thanks in advance,
Shradhanjali

Answer 1

Hello Maen,
Nothing wrong with RFC_PING My point is why use it unnecessarily!
Ofcourse if you've more than one RFM calls to the same RFC destination then using RFC_PING to check the connectivity makes sense. But if you've one RFM call you can check the connectivity in the RFM call itself.
Something like this:
CALL FUNCTION 'RFC_PING'
  DESTINATION 'ZTESTSDN'
  EXCEPTIONS
    system_failure        = 1  MESSAGE v_msg
    communication_failure = 2  MESSAGE v_msg.
IF sy-subrc NE 0.
  MESSAGE 'Cannot Connect to the Destination' TYPE 'E'.
ENDIF.
* Call the RFMs only if the RFC_PING succeeds
CALL FUNCTION 'Z_TEST_RFC1' DESTINATION 'ZTESTSDN'.
CALL FUNCTION 'Z_TEST_RFC2' DESTINATION 'ZTESTSDN'.
For single calls:
CALL FUNCTION 'Z_TEST_RFC1'
  DESTINATION 'ZTESTSDN'
  EXCEPTIONS
    system_failure        = 1  MESSAGE v_msg
    communication_failure = 2  MESSAGE v_msg.
IF sy-subrc NE 0.
  MESSAGE 'Cannot Connect to the Destination' TYPE 'E'.
ENDIF.
Anyway SAP recommends to use these predefined RFC Exceptions for every RFM call. A quote from the SAP documentation:
We strongly recommend that you assign a return value to both these exceptions for every RFC, and that you handle this return value, as otherwise a runtime error will occur in the exception situations in question.
Hope i'm clear.
BR,
Suhas