SAP to WCS catalog data import

Question

I have a requirement for doing a catalog data import from SAP to websphere commerce database.

I am trying to figure out the best possible solutions that can be implemented and need your suggestions.

1. I did research that the data can be loaded through .csv files in the WCS. Is that a good way to ask SAP team to provide the feed in the csv format and upload that directly to the commerce database.

2. Or I should have a middleware in between SAP and WCS for the data processing which can actually get the data from SAP and convert it into the WCS format and then dataload can be done in WCS.

3. Is there any other approach which can be done?

Answer 1

There is an SAP to IBM whitepaper. Your IBM technical contact will be able to provide it to you. Also if you do a google search there are quite a lot of entries - https://www.google.com/search?q=websphere+commerce+sap&oq=websphere+commerce+sap&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j69i65l3j69i59.2683j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8.

Personally, If you're using an MDM product, I'd use an adapter. If you're looking for speed, use the WCS dataload utility. If you're looking to do adhoc changes, use the WCS web services. I would also highly suggest you use an ESB since you're most likely going to push content to more than the eCommerce channel. IBM Integration Bus has a SAP adaptor that understands SAP iDoc.

Answer 2

You can use SAP PO services as a middleware between SAP and WCS. The easiest way is to get the data from SAP and convert the data into the IBM readable format in XML files. These files can be split into different files containing the catentry data, attribute data, catentry - catgroup relation. Drop the files in some location for WCS to pick them and load. Run the dataload utility in WCS by providing the right order of loader.

SAP PO contains all the functionalities of PI, plus BPM and BRM in a single Java stack. I hope you were able to visualize the evolution of SAP middleware.