❗ 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.

• (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

• 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

• 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:

• Electron
• NW.js
• Node-RED
• Sails JS
• CloudFoundry, AWS Lambdas, heroku ...

• 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

• 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

• ❗ 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

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

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.

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

• Part I RFC Client Programming
• Part II RFC Server Programming
• Part III Advanced Topics

and more:

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

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

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.

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