Loading data directly from the SAP database

Note: The information in this guide applies to the SAP Purchase-to-Pay Connector for AppOne and SAP Order-to-Cash Connector for AppOne.

Introduction

When you want to use an SAP Connector with data loaded directly from the SAP database you must take the following action to configure this correctly.

• Set up Native SAP Connection;
• Configure the SAP Connector for the SAP connection.

Set up native SAP connection

See (Set up Native SAP Extraction for a detailed description on how to connect directly to the SAP database using the native SAP connection.

Note: Also the custom Function module Z_XTRACT_IS_TABLE must be installed on your SAP system.

Important:

To load the data from the SAP database you need an SAP account to be used to retrieve data. For reasons of compliance and data protection you must make sure that this SAP account used to retrieve data has limited access to SAP and only has the appropriate authorizations. See Set up Native SAP Extraction - Prerequisites.

Note that it is possible that the user who performs the actual data load from SAP has access to more data in Process Mining after loading the data than this user has in SAP, depending on the SAP authorizations of the user.

Configuring the SAP connector for the SAP connection

In order to load data correctly you must specify the following settings in the SAP Connector:

SAP Setting	Description
SAP Host	The IP-address of the SAP server. Note: Do not provide the DNS Host name.
SAP Systemnumber	The SAP system number which was provided during installation. This is a number between 00 and 99.
SAP Username	The username of the SAP account used to retrieve data from SAP.
SAP Password	Either enter: the password identifier from the credential store that contains the password of the account that is being used to log in to the SAP instance, or the password of the SAP account used to retrieve data from SAP in plain text. See Using a Credential Store for password storage.
SAP Client	The SAP Client number.

Follow these steps to set the enter the settings for the SAP Connection in the SAP Connector.

Step	Action
1	Make sure the input type is set to use the native SAP connection. See Loading data
2	Open the SAP Connector in your development environment.
3	Go to the Datatab and select the Connector_settings table.
4	Edit the expressions in the SAP Settings folder to enter the correct values. See the illustration below.

Note: The provided settings are used by the SAP Connection string expression.

Using a credential store for password storage

A Credential store allows you to use passwords without showing the actual password. For the connection from the SAP Connector to the SAP database it is also possible to use a Credential store to store the actual password of the SAP account in a secured way.

Note: By default, a password identifier from the Credential store is configured in the SAP Connector. If you do not use a Credential store you must adapt the SAP Connection string expression accordingly. See the illustration below.