BAPI Information Landscape
The available BAPI documentation covers the following three areas:
BAPI Development
The
BAPI Programming Guide explains the procedure model for developing your own BAPIs. Specifically, it will deal with the restrictions and guidelines associated with the development of BAPIs, discuss the requirements that BAPIs have to meet, and introduce support tools that can be used for development. The
BAPI Explorer plays a central role in the BAPI development process. The BAPI Explorer enables easy access to all the relevant information in the BAPI environment (including general documentation as well details about special business object types and BAPIs). The Explorer integrates all the tools required for BAPI development and uses project forms to manage all the phases of the development process. This document deals exclusively with the development of new BAPIs. In contrast, instructions for enhancing, extending, and modifying existing BAPIs are described in Further Aspects of BAPI Development.
Further Aspects of BAPI Development
The documents located at this level contain topics that start with the standard case for new development described in the kernel and expand it with practical requirements. The following individual subjects are covered:
SAP Enhancements to Released BAPIs describes how SAP developers can enhance BAPIs that have already been released, and which procedure you have to use.
Customer Enhancement and Modification of BAPIs explains how IBUs, partners, and customers can enhance and modify BAPIs supplied by SAP to meet their own specific needs. In detail, the document explains when the enhancement concept can be applied and when changes to BAPIs can only be implemented through the modification concept.
Using ALE Services describes how ALE inbound processing can be used to implement both synchronous and asynchronous BAPI calls, enabling distributed scenarios. In particular, this document describes in detail the process flow during asynchronous communication with BAPIs and explains which steps you have to perform when generating the BAPI-ALE interface to enable ALE inbound processing for BAPI use.
BAPIs for Mass Data Transfer. In addition, the programming model is introduced for designing BAPIs that are capable of processing mass data.
Using BAPIs in Clients
This area explains how to use and access BAPIs.
BAPI User Guide describes how to retrieve all the meta data required for a call, how to use search help, and so on.
All the documents are available in the SAP Library under CA-BFA.