Programming Jabber

Building an Order Approval Notification Mechanism

We’re going to use a standard Jabber client as an SAP R/3 client—obviously not to replace SAPGUI, rather to allow someone who perhaps has a single R/3-related task to perform and connects only to SAP occasionally. In stark contrast to the SAPGUI client, an off-the-shelf Jabber client is much smaller. It takes up less screen space, memory, and CPU and generally for focused access is a great way for someone to play his part in business processes from the comfort of familiar communication surroundings—his IM client.

Of course, the available Jabber clients don’t have any built-in R/3 functionality per se, but as clients that can receive messages and recognize URLs,^[3] they provide enough horsepower for us to achieve our goal.

That goal is to notify a supervisor whenever a sales order is placed that requires his approval. The notification will arrive in the form of a <message/> element, carrying some descriptive text and, crucially, a URL, which points to an Apache-based handler. When invoked, the handler pulls the relevant information for the order out of R/3, requests verification of the viewer’s identity, and offers a chance to approve the order with the click of a button.

Effectively we’re building a miniworkflow scenario: in one direction a notification is transmitted out of the bounds of the SAP universe to the approver, and in the other direction the notification process is turned around in a one-step approval cycle via Apache. ...