SAP Communication Channels with PI/XI

Communication channels are used in SAP instances to convert documents. These channels can be monitored from within the Communication Channel Monitor. SAP CPS uses the SAP PI/XI interfaces to interact with communication channels.

Communication channels can be controlled in three ways:

Manual - You control the communication channel by choosing Start or Stop in the Communication Channel Monitor.
Automatic - The communication channel is controlled by availability times.
External - The communication channel is controlled by an external scheduler, such as SAP CPS.

This can be set in the Communication Channel Monitor.

You configure SAP CPS to control the channels as outlined in the Controlling Communication Channels with SAP CPS section of the documentation.

The following table lists the job definitions that are available to control communication channels:

Job Definition	Description
SAP_PI_GetChannelStatus	Retrieves the current status of an SAP XI/PI channel
SAP_PI_ImportChannels	Imports SAP XI/PI channels
SAP_PI_StartChannel	Starts an SAP XI/PI channel
SAP_PI_StopChannel	Stops an SAP XI/PI channel

Prerequisistes

You switched to external control in the .
You configured SAP CPS to connect to the PI interface of your SAP instance, this is outlined in the Controlling Communication Channels with SAP CPS

Features

You import communication channels by submitting the SAP_PI_ImportChannels job definition against the SAP instance. This job definition should be scheduled to run regularly, to make sure SAP CPS has an up-to-date list of communication channels.
You check the status of communication channels by submitting the job definition SAP_PI_GetChannelStatus against the desired communication channel of the SAP instance.
You can stop and start communication channels by submitting the job definitions SAP_PI_StartChannel and SAP_PI_StopChannel, respectively, against the desired communication channel of the SAP instance. These job definitions should be scheduled to allow automated control of the communication channels. If you have the Chargeable version and a free platform agent license, you can use file events to trigger the job. the communication channel is then started as soon as a specific file has been copied to a particular directory. This can be used to wait until all files have arrived before the communication channel is started, for example.