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Use

SAP ACO is an integrated ABAP component that is designed to consume RFC Services on remote ABAP systems. The SAP ACO is especially useful whenever the interface of the remote function or related dictionary types are either not available at all in the client system, or are available in different versions on different systems.

SAP ACO Use Cases

Note

The SAP ACo Client works with any versions of RFC server system

Basically, SAP ACO leverages the features introduced with SAP Java Connector 3 (JCo) or SAP .Net Connector 3 (NCo) for the ABAP stack:

  • Retrieve metadata via APIs which are used by JCo and NCo

  • Dynamic RFC call of any RFC function module and dynamically set/get the parameter values

  • For convenience it is possible to create static proxies (not supported in JCo/NCo 3)

  • Support for asynchronous RFC

SAP ACO supports two paradigms to access the remote function:

  1. Generation of a static proxy

    A proxy class is generated once by specifying the remote system and the remote function. After the proxy is generated, the class belongs to the client program.

    The client program is solely responsible for regenerating the class when the function or the related data types in remote system are changed incompatibly. The big advantage is that the proxy class is easy to use, as the interface and all types are statically defined and the syntax check is able to perform most checks at design time.

  2. Dynamic access to the values and metadata of all parameters

    You can read and set the values easily with getter/setter methods. The parameter and types are determined at runtime by the ACO accessing the remote server system. Changes in interface or data types on remote system are transparent and it is easily possible to communicate with different systems containing different versions of the function or the relating data types. This concept is well accepted and proven in the SAP Java Connector 3 or SAP .Net Connector.