External Services

You can use external services to communicate with external systems and applications independent of implementation language, technology, or platform. This ensures that the pre-existing functions of these systems and applications can be reused in CAF.

In CAF, you call back-end functions with the following external services:

• Remote function calls (RFCs)
• Web services

You cannot modify external services. You only define dependencies from the application to the external service, and then expose or consume the external service from your application service. External services are always stateless, meaning a session opens and closes within the call.

You can use the RFCs to communicate with ABAP-based SAP systems. RFCs are interfaces that enable external communication with the function modules of SAP systems.

You can import the metadata (including methods and input and output parameters) of RFCs into CAF and subsequently make them available to other CAF services.

More information: Importing RFC Modules

The Web services enable the use of remote methods in your application with the power of system interoperability. The WSDL (Web Service Description Language) files are imported and retrieved from a directory or UDDI server. You can find a Web service definition either by specifying the URL of its WSDL file, or by browsing the Services Registry or the Enterprise Service Registry.

More information: Importing Web Services

CAF supports the consumption of flat and complex structures when calling Web services. In addition, you can use certain Web service facets.

More information: Supported Web Service Structures and Facets