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This unit introduces you to the structure of the mySAP Business Suite family of solutions. Furthermore,
you are given a first overview of the integration and technology patform SAP NetWeaver. Finally, we
will deal with SAP’s release strategy.

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The ABAP Dispatcher is the central process of the application ABAP. It manages the resources for the
applications written in ABAP in coordination with the respective operating system. The main tasks of the
ABAP dispatcher include the distribution of the transaction load to the work processes, the integration of
the presentation layer and the organization of communication transactions.
The processing requests are first saved in request queues, and processed according to the “first in, first out”
principle.
The ABAP dispatcher distributes the requests one after the other to the available work processes. Data is
actually processed in the work process, although the user who created the request using the SAP GUI is
not always assigned the same work process. There is no fixed assignment of work processes to users. To
process user requests it might be necessary to read data from the ABAP schema of the database or to
write to it. For this, every work process is connected directly to the ABAP schema of the database.
Once the process is complete, the processing result from the work process is sent via the dispatcher back
to the SAP GUI. The SAP GUI interprets the received data and generates the output screen for the user
with the help of the operating system on the front end computer.

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Sequence:
1. The user input data
2. The data is sended to the dispatcher
3. The dispatcher assigns work process for handling of data
4. The database stores the data

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• Dialog work processes fulfill all requests for the execution of dialog steps triggered by an active user.
Every dispatcher requires at least two dialog work processes.
• • pool work processes pass sequential data flows on to printers. Every SAP system requires at least one
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spool work process, you can also have more than one spool work process per dispatcher.
• • pdate work processes execute update requests. Similarly to spool work processes, you need at least
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one update work process per SAP system, and you can have more than one per dispatcher.
• • ackground work processes execute programs that run without interacting with the user. You need at
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least two background work processes for each SAP system. You can configure more than one
background work process for each dispatcher.
• • he enqueue work process administers the lock table in the shared memory. The lock table contains
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the logical database locks of the ABAP stack of the SAP system. Only one enqueue work process is
needed for each system.

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The ABAP runtime system provides additional services (these are not work processes) for internal and
external communication:

• he message server (MS): handles the communication between the distributed dispatchers within the
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ABAP stack of an SAP system, thereby enabling scalability of several parallel application servers. The
message server is configured only once per SAP system.

• he gateway server (GW): enables communication between SAP systems, or between SAP systems and
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external application systems. There is one per dispatcher.

• he Internet Communication Manager (ICM): enables SAP systems to communicate directly with the
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Internet. The ICM receives requests from the Internet and forwards them to the SAP system for
processing. In doing so, it recognizes whether the request is a call of a BSP or a Java application and
forwards this request to the ABAP runtime environment or the Java runtime environment. It can also
direct HTTP requests from an SAP system to aWeb server and send the response back to the SAP system.
You can configure a maximum of one ICM process per application server (software-based view).

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The local work process overview (SM50) provides comprehensive information on the work processes
configured on an instance, such as their current status, the amount of CPU time required since they
started and administration functions (restarting a work process, trace functions). Work processes should
always be configured to restart automatically: value “Yes”in Start column. The F1 help provides further
information on various fields in the overview.

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It is possible to check two areas:
- Reserve main memory areas: only for use of one work process. Inside, there are two areas:
Roll area: data is stored here when the dialog work process starts. At the end, this data is bring out,
probably to the database.
Paging area: is used for application to store big amounts of data assigned to dialog work process

- Shared Memory: used jointly by all the work processes

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The processing of a transaction that consists of multiple screens is usually executed using multiple,
different dialog work processes. This distribution is called work process multiplexing. Work process
multiplexing means that a system function whose content is logically connected but consists of multiple
substeps can be processed by various dialog work processes. These steps, where the content is connected,
are described as transactions. A transaction that consists of multiple screens, such as screens 100 and 200
can also be processed by multiple dialog work processes.

The figure shows two screens of a transaction (100 and 200), for which the input is handled by two
different dialog work processes. The multiplexing procedure is used exclusively for dialog work
processes. All other work process types process entire functions; that is, complete business processes.

As dialog work processes may process only parts of transactions that are connected from a business point
of view; the update procedure with the update work process is widely used in SAP systems.

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- Answer the questions

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