Collaboration Profile

Addressing Senders and Receivers

You have the following options for addressing the sender or receiver of a message:

Communication party (party for short)

More information: Communication Party
Communication component (component for short)

More information: Communication Component

The message protocol supports the addressing of senders and receivers on two levels: The first level corresponds to a company unit, the second to a technical or semantic unit within a company unit or company. You represent the first addressing level with the Communication Party object, and the second by the Communication Component object.

Depending on the scenario, you can define the sender and receiver of a message very flexibly with these objects. The options are listed in the following table.

Addressing	Typical Usages
Party with assigned communication components	You use this type of addressing when configuring collaborative processes in which whole companies communicate with each other. You then use a communication party to represent each company. A communication component represents a business or technical entities within a company. In business-to-business processes (or cross-company processes) the companies involved usually provide a variety of communication components for communicating with other companies.
Communication components independent of a party	You use this type of addressing when configuring processes in which the system landscape is known to you. This is usually the case in application-to-application processes. The definition of communication parties is not mandatory. This enables you instead to specify the known business systems and integration processes (defined in Integration Directory as business system components or integration process components) directly as either the sender or receiver of a message. In this way, you can address individual business systems directly and thus create receiver determinations and interface determinations very easily.

Addressing

Typical Usages

Party with assigned communication components

You use this type of addressing when configuring collaborative processes in which whole companies communicate with each other.

You then use a communication party to represent each company. A communication component represents a business or technical entities within a company.

In business-to-business processes (or cross-company processes) the companies involved usually provide a variety of communication components for communicating with other companies.

Communication components independent of a party

You use this type of addressing when configuring processes in which the system landscape is known to you. This is usually the case in application-to-application processes.

The definition of communication parties is not mandatory. This enables you instead to specify the known business systems and integration processes (defined in Integration Directory as business system components or integration process components) directly as either the sender or receiver of a message. In this way, you can address individual business systems directly and thus create receiver determinations and interface determinations very easily.

Note

Note that it may sometimes be necessary to use communication parties when configuring internal company processes, for example in the case of IDoc communication. If the IDoc partner is not of type logical system , you must map the IDoc partner to a communication party in the Integration Directory.

Communication Components

You define the systems involved in the process as communication components in the Integration Directory.

Create communication components of type Business System for those systems that you are familiar with (using the integration expert role). These are based on business systems that are described in the System Landscape Directory.

Note

The system landscape description in the SLD is based on the following entity types:

Business systems

Are defined for all systems that communicate with each other. Business systems are logical systems that play the role as senders or receivers of messages. Business systems can be SAP systems or third-party systems. Each business system has to be assigned to a technical system.
Technical systems

Are defined for all systems that are actually installed in your system landscape.

More information: Separation of Business Systems and Technical Systems

You can enter communication components of type Business Component (as representatives of the external system) for external systems of a business partner (business-to-business scenarios) that are not specified in greater detail. In addition to this, in business-to-business scenarios you can map the business partners and partner companies as communication parties .

If an executable integration process is used, this is also addressed as a communication component.

Communication Channels and Adapter Configuration

You define the available technical communication options of a component in Communication Channels .

A sender communication channel contains the information that determines the inbound processing of a message that is sent by a sender component to the Integration Server.

A receiver communication channel contains the related information for the outbound processing of a message that is sent by the Integration Server to a receiver component.

You can access the adapter configuration directly from the communication channel. An adapter

Note

These technical communication capabilities are also called Connectivity and are realized in the various different Adapters .

You can assign multiple communication channels to one party or one communication component within a collaboration profile.

Note

You define which communication channel exactly is to be used for exchanging messages between a sender and receiver in the collaboration agreement for the sender/receiver pair.

More information: Communication Channel