Passing deep data structures to ABAP SOAP Provider from external system using SSIS

Question

we need to pass deep data structures from an external system to SAP using SSIS. Since my colleague tells me SSIS does not have any data types resembling ABAP structures or tables our first approach was to pass an XML file as string.

However then the problem arose that SSIS has a 5000 character limit on strings rendering this approach futile aswell.

He then suggested passing the xml string as type "Object" since there, no such restriction exists.

Unfortunately in ABAP it is not possible to parameterize an RFC Function Module with generic parameters from where I could try to do some casting. Furthermore the Object type cannot be passed to the importing string parameter of the FM and I don't know what dictionary data type corresponds to object, in fact I think there is none. Is there maybe a way around this?

A final approach I thought of was to split the string and call the fm multiple times storing the string each time. However, I'm told that splitting the string is also not possible in SSIS. I am somewhat doubtful that SSIS really has all that shortcomings since those sound more like basic functionality but what do I know... (in regard to SSIS, nothing at all)

Does anybody have an idea on how to pass the deep structure to ABAP SOAP Provider?

Cheers

Answer 1

Using Script component to upload string in this case xml.

build the XML using sql as defined in this post:

https://www.sqlshack.com/for-xml-path-clause-in-sql-server/

How to execute that SQL and return into a string:

            string uploadSOAP = "";
            using (OleDbConnection conn = new OleDbConnection([your conn string]))
            {
                string sql = [your XML SQL query];
                using (OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, conn))
                {
                    cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
                    conn.Open();
                    uploadSOAP = (string) cmd.ExecuteScaler();
                }
            }

Now how to upload that string:

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
//wc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential([username],[password]);
wc.UploadString([url to upload to],uploadSOAP);

Namespaces to add (in the using section):

System.Data.OleDb;
System.Net;

Notes:

1. ExecuteScalar() returns the value from 1st row and 1st column in the case of for XML path is your entire xml string
2. string data type really doesn't have a limit in c#. I've seen some places that it is 2GB of data. You can convert to a stream if you are getting larger than that and then use uploadData.
3. I will insert a commented out code for adding credentials.