MDM Web Services 

General Concept of Web Services

Web services are web-based interfaces that can be integrated into business scenarios of a company based on open and commonly accepted standards. They describe a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards.

Web services represent a self-contained subset of application functionality allowing different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without time-consuming custom coding.  Because all communication is in XML, Web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style aimed at achieving loose coupling, and thereby permitting the reuse of interacting software agents/components. While these concepts have existed for decades, the adoption of SOA is accelerating due to the emergence of standards-based integration technologies, mainly Web services.

You can best benefit from SOA by assembling/combining existing services and reusable components into new applications - Composite Applications. A composite application describes the combination of services into new functionality.

The Web services paradigm below, shows the basic architecture of the Web services framework:

SAP has coined the term Enterprise SOA (previously Enterprise Service Architecture). Technically speaking, an enterprise service is a Web service with business functionality and enterprise quality (with regard to scalability, robustness, security). Looking at the bigger picture, Enterprise SOA architecture is more than a collection of Web services; it is a comprehensive solution for the new emerging requirements for enterprise applications (for example, business process).

Introduction to MDM Web Services

Web services for MDM are open interfaces to the MDM Server. They are based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) standards. They provide data management capabilities (create, read, update) and access to central key mapping (create, read). MDM Web Services provide synchronous access to MDM for the consumer of the Web services.

The MDM Web services can be used to:

●      Manage Master Data Objects

○       Existence check of a central master object before local creation

○       Retrieve details and create a local replicate

○       Create or update master data objects on MDM

●      Manage Unique Identifiers of Master Data Objects

○       Remote system registers local object as replicate of global object

○       Key mapping during message exchange on SAP NetWeaver XI

The following graphic shows how the MDM Web services are used:

Features

MDM Web services provides the following Web service categories:

●      Key Mapping Web services

To create and retrieve key mapping information for MDM records

●      CRUD (Create, Retrieve and Update; Delete not yet provided) Web services

Exposes MDM's rich functionality in searching for records and maintaining data in records (for example, main table, lookups, qualifiers)

Another category of Web services, developed to support MDM Customer Data Integration (CDI), is the Business Partner (BP) CRUD Web services. In contrast to MDM CRUD Web services that are schema-independent, the BP Web services are hard-wired to MDM’s Business Partner repository/schema. Schema changes require the adaptation of the interface and of the code of the BP Web services.

MDM documentation is located on the SAP Service Marketplace in the SAP MDM 5.5 Documentation Center: service.sap.com/installMDM.