node-rfc v2

❗ Breaking changes at 2.0

Asynchronous, non-blocking SAP NetWeawer RFC SDK client bindings for Node.js, providing convenient ABAP business logic consumption from NodeJS.

Key features

(new) RFM call templates: rfmcall
Based on N-API standard
Stateless and stateful connections (multiple function calls in the same ABAP session (same context))
Async/await, promise and callback API
ECMAScript, TypeScript
Sequential and parallel calls, using one or more clients
Automatic conversion between NodeJS and ABAP datatypes
Direct and managed connections (connection pool)
Throughput monitoring: number of calls, bytes sent/received, application/total time; SAP NWRFC SDK >= 7.53 required

Content

Supported Platforms
Prerequisites
Installation
Getting started
Usage
- Authentication
- Client
- Connection Pool
- Throughput
API
- Connection Pool
- Client
- Throughput
Troubleshooting
More resource and info about SAP Connectors and RFC communication
Code of Conduct
Contributing
License

Supported platforms

Current and active nodejs LTS releases
The node-rfc connector can be built from source on all platforms supported both by SAP NW RFC SDK and by nodejs
Pre-built binaries are provided for active nodejs LTS releases, for 64 bit Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04 and macOS 10.15.

Other platforms and frameworks:

Prerequisites

All platforms

SAP NW RFC SDK C++ binaries must be downloaded (SAP partner or customer account required) and locally installed (installation instructions. More information on SAP NW RFC SDK section on SAP Support Portal. Using the latest version is reccomended as SAP NW RFC SDK is fully backwards compatible, supporting all NetWeaver systems, from today S4, down to R/3 release 4.6C.
Build toolchain requires CMake
Build from source on macOS and older Linux systems, may require uchar.h file, attached to SAP OSS Note 2573953, to be copied to SAP NW RFC SDK include directory: documentation

Windows

Visual C++ Redistributable is required for runtime. The version is given in SAP Note 2573790 - Installation, Support and Availability of the SAP NetWeaver RFC Library 7.50
Build toolchain requires Microsoft C++ Build Tools, the latest version reccomended

macOS

❗ Stay on SAP NWRFC SDK <= 7.55 until #143 closed
Disable macOS firewall stealth mode (Can't ping a machine - why?):

sudo /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/socketfilterfw --setstealthmode off

Installation

More info: Installation

❗ The npm installation and build from source, work only with NodeJS versions with minimum N-API 6: NodeJS/N-API version matrix. Usage works with all NodeJS versions supported by node-rfc.

After the SAP NW RFC SDK is installed on your system, the node-rfc can be installed from npm:

npm install node-rfc

Alternatively, when the node-rfc package is not provided for your platform for example, you can build the package from source:

git clone --single-branch https://github.com/SAP/node-rfc.git
cd node-rfc
npm install
npm run addon # rebuild native addon
npm run ts    # rebuild typescript wrapper

Getting started

More info: Usage and API

In order to call remote enabled ABAP function module, we need to create a node-rfc client instance with valid logon credentials, connect to SAP ABAP NetWeaver system and then invoke a remote enabled ABAP function module from nodejs. The client instance can be used for one or more subsequent RFC calls, see unit tests for more examples. Callback API example below shows basic principles.

"use strict";

const Client = require("node-rfc").Client;

const abapSystem = {
    user: "demo",
    passwd: "welcome",
    ashost: "10.68.104.164",
    sysnr: "00",
    client: "620",
    lang: "EN",
};

// create new client
const client = new Client(abapSystem);

// open connection
client.connect(function (err) {
    // check for login/connection errors
    if (err) return console.error("could not connect to server", err);

    // invoke ABAP function module, passing structure and table parameters

    // ABAP structure
    const structure = {
        RFCINT4: 345,
        RFCFLOAT: 1.23456789,
        RFCCHAR4: "ABCD",
        RFCDATE: "20180625", // ABAP date format
        // or RFCDATE: new Date('2018-06-25'), // as JavaScript Date object, with clientOption "date"
    };
    // ABAP table
    let table = [structure];

    client.invoke(
        "STFC_STRUCTURE",
        { IMPORTSTRUCT: structure, RFCTABLE: table },
        function (err, res) {
            if (err)
                return console.error("Error invoking STFC_STRUCTURE:", err);
            console.log("STFC_STRUCTURE call result:", res);
        }
    );
});

Finally, the connection is closed automatically when the instance is deleted by the garbage collector or by explicitly calling the client.close() method of the direct client, or client.release() or pool.release() for the managed client.

More resource and info about ABAP Connectors and RFC Communication

Highly reccomended series of three insightful articles about RFC communication and SAP NW RFC Library, published in the SAP Professional Journal (SPJ):

and more:

SAP NWRFC SDK 7.50 Programming Guide
ABAP Connectors
SAP NWRFC SDK
node-addon-api

Known Issues

NAPI Type checks nodejs/node-addon-api/#265

How to obtain support

If you encounter an issue or have a feature request, you can create a ticket.

Check out the SCN Forum (search for "node-rfc") and stackoverflow (use the tag "node-rfc"), to discuss code-related problems and questions.

Contributing

We appreciate contributions from the community to node-rfc! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details on our philosophy around extending this module.

brunopenso / node-rfc