Application engine

The application engine either handles a request from the Monitoring and Error Handling itself or it forwards the request to one of the other engines. The application engine is responsible for restarting and canceling messages. Depending on the interfaces’ interface technology, the corresponding restart and cancel procedures are triggered. Furthermore, the application engine is responsible for the navigation to the external monitor. The external monitor is the transaction that is usually used for monitoring messages of a specific technology. The application engine enables the initial processing of a message received by the system the SAP Application Interface Framework is located on. The application engine also sends messages to a different system using the SAP Application Interface Framework.

Persistence engine

The persistence engine is responsible for handling the data a message transferred. The persistence engine reads the data from an interface’s persistence layer. In order to display the message data in the Data Content view, the persistence engine transforms the data into the raw or SAP data structure (see Data Content View). If data is changed by a user in Monitoring and Error Handling, the persistence engine is responsible for transforming the changed data into a format that can be persisted. Afterwards, the persistence engine updates the data on the persistence layer. Furthermore, if a user edits a message’s content, the persistence engine locks the message to prevent different users from editing the same message at the same time. The persistence engine unlocks the data after the user has saved the data to the persistence.

Selection engine

The selection engine is responsible for selecting the data displayed in the Data Message view (see Data Messages View). If the SAP Application Interface Framework is involved in processing a message, this data can be selected from an interface’s index table. For scenarios where the SAP Application Interface Framework is not involved in processing the message, the data is retrieved from the table containing the header data of the processed messages. For example, for IDocs, the data is selected from the IDoc control records. The data the selection engine selects is dependent on the entries made on the selection screen. Furthermore, the selection engine has to format the data so that it can be displayed in the Data Message view.

Logging engine

The logging engines retrieves the data displayed in the Log Message view (see Log Messages View). The log messages are retrieved and arranged in the SAP Application Interface Framework application context structure that can be displayed in the Log Messages view. Furthermore, if log messages exist, which are related to a specific field/line of the data message, context data is prepared to allow the user to navigate to the error in the Data Content view (see Data Content View).

Custom engines

You can define your own engines in Customizing for SAP Application Interface Framework under  Additional Interface Properties Define Custom Engines . You must define a namespace and a custom engine ID. For each namespace / custom engine ID combination, you can maintain an application engine, persistence engine, selection engine, and/or logging engine. Once you define a custom engine, you can maintain it in Customizing for the SAP Application Interface Framework under  Additional Interface Properties Specify Interface Engines .

The following are engines supported when processing data with the SAP Application Interface Framework:

The following are engines to support test files:

The file engines are used to display test file data processed with the Interface Test Tool (transaction code /AIF/Test) in Monitoring and Error Handling. The file engines are used if this was specifically Customized during interface definition, or if the file was processed with the Interface Test Tool of the SAP Application Interface Framework.

The following are the default engines used: