ITS Internet Transaction Server

GUI Replacement for Internet Access

ITS is a SAP provided web server application that serves the dialog between SAP R/3 and a web browser. The ITS was designed to provide R/3 access via the internet for a selected range of users and application, mainly with e-commerce in mind.

R/3 cannot communicate directly with HTTP servers
 Although both R/3 and internet applications are basically client-server applications, they adhere to completely different communication standards. The communication standard between an internet browser and an internet server is HTTP, which accepts eg. HTML, Javascript or CGI. R/3 developed a proprietary standard, which is called the SAPGUI. The SAPGUI works technically the same way as an internet browser like IE or Netscape does, but the used language differs from HTTP supported standards.
Information broker
 The Internet Transaction Server is an information broker to access SAP as an information server from a web site. This is the same function principle as a search engine. The user enters a request and the search engine looks the result up in a database, which is transformed into a HTML page.
ITS takes the role of SAP GUI, when R/3 is accessed via the internet
 Hiatus
ITS translates HTML into RFC-Calls and vica versa
 ITS is a relatively simple piece of software, which does principly the following actions repeatedly:
  • Send a HTML form to the browser
  • Receive the filled form
  • Extract the form data from the form
  • Call the appropriate transaction in R/3
  • Catch the transaction result screen
  • Transform the result into an HTML page
  • Send the HTML page to the browser
ITS is a web server application like a CGI application
 Technically, ITS is a web server application that interfaces via HTTP with a web browser. This is a common feature of powerful web servers. Such a server application is found behind most CGI scripts.
ITS is the interpretor between the R/3 application and the browser
 Hiatus
ITS transcribes R/3 transactions and does not provide own intelligence
 ITS is not a true programming language, as eg. Delphi, Java or Perl. It merely transcribes SAP transaction into HTML code. This is a characteristic and major drawback of the ITS. In order to bring individual logic into the web communication, you would have to write transaction ABAPs, thus putting all intelligence into R/3.
Server based RFC is the alternative
 There are other means to provide the same results. A straight-forward approach would be to create a server apllication in any object oriented language which is able to do RFC. If the web server is a Windows NT system, this is true for nearly every modern Windows programming languge which can call DLLs. I see many advantages in writing the web application with Borland Delphi Connect or Java, which calls appropriate BAPIs in R/3. The advantage is a high flexibility for the server application. The only serious disadvantage of the RFC approach is, that you cannot use effectively the SAP security concept. However, a professionally set up proxy could be already more than sufficient for this task.

Standard Communication in SAP

In order to understand the principle of the ITS you should be familiar with the general client-server architecture of R/3.

Application server communicates with database server and SAP GUI
 The R/3 application runs on one or more application servers. This application server performs requests to a database server, prepares the results and sends them to the SAPGUI.
ITS interfaces between application server and browser
 The Internet Transaction Server is an information broker to access SAP as an information server from a web site.

SAP and E-commerce

E-commerce solution
 When the ITS had been developed, it was the time when SAP was looking for an e-commerce approach. The idea was, to have a mean to easily prepare web sites with instant real-time access to the R/3 data. The original target for the application had been companies, with a range of remote key customers or affiliates, who should be able to enter orders directly into the system. Instead of offline recording of orders, which have to be entered as IDocs into R/3, the data should be entered directly into R/3. The advantages are evident: real-time access, online-request of availability, online confirmation etc.