Capture changes in the ERP system and sent them to Kafka
Source code available here: github
On any computer install the Docker Daemon - if it is not already - and download this docker image with
docker pull rtdi/s4hanaconnector
Then start the image via docker run. For a quick test this command is sufficient
docker run -d -p 80:8080 --rm --name s4hanaconnector rtdi/s4hanaconnector
to expose a webserver at port 80 on the host running the container. Make sure to open the web page via the http prefix, as https needs more configuration. For example http://localhost:80/ might do the trick of the container is hosted on the same computer.
The default login for this startup method is: rtdi / rtdi!io
The probably better start command is to mount two host directories into the container, the rtdiconfig directory where all settings made when configuring the connector will be stored permanently and the security directory for web server specific settings like user database and SSL certificates.
docker run -d -p 80:8080 -p 443:8443 --rm \
-v /home/dir/rtdiconfig:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/rtdiconfig \
-v /home/dir/security:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/security \
--name s4hanaconnector rtdi/s4hanaconnector
For proper start commands, especially https and security related, see the ConnectorRootApp project, this application is based on.
The first step is to connect the application to a Kafka server, in this example Confluent Cloud.
A Connection holds all information about the S/4Hana underlying Hana database. It connects via the Hana JDBC driver, not the ABAP layer. The database user should be a new user which has read permissions on the S/4Hana tables and the permissions to create triggers on the SAP tables. Inside the own schema two control tables are created which are also the target of the triggers.
Clicking on the Add icon allows opens the setting dialog
The JDBCURL for a Hana database is usually in the format jdbc:sap://:315/, e.g. jdbc:sap://dbhost:39015/HXE. The source database schema is the Hana schema name where all SAP tables can be found.
The next step is to create the Avro Schemas for the SAP tables.
Under Manage Schemas all already imported schemas can be found.
Initially there will be none so clicking on the Add icon opens the dialog where all S/4Hana tables are shown. The screen supports search capabilities and all selected tables are created as new schemas when saving.
A Producer stands for the process creating the data. One producer writes all data into a single topic to ensure transactional consistency. For example a producer might capture all Material Management related data and produce that data in the topic MaterialManagement.
The data in Kafka is a 1:1 copy if the ABAP table structure plus some extra metadata information about the record, e.g. the Hana transaction id.
This application is provided as dual license. For all users with less than 100'000 messages created per month, the application can be used free of charge and the code falls under a Gnu Public License. Users with more than 100'000 messages are asked to get a commercial license to support further development of this solution. The commercial license is on a monthly pay-per-use basis.
Every ten minutes the application does send the message statistics via a http call to a central server where the data is stored for information along with the public IP address (usually the IP address of the router). It is just a count which service was invoked how often, no information about endpoints, users, data or URL parameters. This information is collected to get an idea about the adoption. To disable that, set the environment variable HANAAPPCONTAINERSTATISTICS=FALSE.
