I finally found a few spare moments to catch the Ruby saprfc implementation up with the Perl one.
saprfc for Ruby now has support for registered RFCs, enabling Ruby programmers to call out to their favourite language from within SAP ABAP code.

The following example demonstrates a simple replacement for the example registered RFC program that SAP supply - rfcexec. rfcexec allows native system calls to be made on remote non-SAP hosts where the rfcexec program is running.
On the SAP R/3 side of things, you need to create the relevent registered RFC connectoid, by going to transaction SM59 "Display and Maintain RFC Destinations". Create a new TCP/IP connection, set the activation type to "registered server program", and then enter the Registered Server Program - Program ID. In this case it is "wibble.rfcexec" (you choose something better :-). 

require "lib/SAP/Rfc"

rfc = SAP::Rfc.new("", "", "", "", "", "", 1, "wibble.rfcexec", "localhost",
"3318")

iface = SAP::Iface.new("RFC_REMOTE_PIPE")
iface.addParm( SAP::Parm.new("COMMAND", nil, RFCIMPORT, RFCTYPE_CHAR, 256) )
iface.addParm( SAP::Parm.new("READ", nil, RFCIMPORT, RFCTYPE_CHAR, 1) )
iface.addParm( SAP::Tab.new("PIPEDATA", nil, 80) )

iface.callback = Proc.new  do |iface|
   call = `#{iface.COMMAND.value()}`
   call.split(/\n/).each do |val|
     iface.PIPEDATA.value.push(val.ljust(80))
   end
end

rfc.iface(iface)

rfc.accept()

In order to test this you need to create a test ABAP program in SAP R/3 - the code below corresponds to the example: 

REPORT  ZPXH1                                   .
parameters: cmd(80) lower case default 'ls -latr'.
data:
   begin of pipedata occurs 0,
     row(80),
   end of pipedata.

CALL FUNCTION 'RFC_REMOTE_PIPE' destination 'WIBBLE.RFCEXEC'
  EXPORTING
    COMMAND       = cmd
    READ          = 'X'
* IMPORTING
*   SYSTEM        =
*   TRDIR         =
  TABLES
    PIPEDATA      = PIPEDATA
          .
loop at pipedata.
  write: /01 pipedata.
endloop.

Happy SAPing :-)

Further information on saprfc can be found at: SAP::Rfc.

Posted by PiersHarding at December 29, 2003 11:04 PM