Normally, the RFCs and IDocs sent to Adapter for SAP from an SAP system are assigned to a specific service by an adapter notification. However, in some cases, you might want to route an RFC or IDoc through the routing listener.

Adapter for SAP includes a default routing listener that manages the routing of messages. It determines how and where to route a message based on routing notifications that you define. Each routing notification is associated with a transport that will be chosen and invoked when the routing notification is called.

When the routing listener receives a message, it performs a routing notification lookup. After locating the routing notification for the incoming message, the specified outbound transport gets invoked.

Routing notifications indicate how a message is to be processed. Each routing notification is uniquely identified by its sender, receiver, and message type. When Adapter for SAP receives a message, it performs a routing notification lookup to match the sender, receiver, and message type of the incoming message with the sender, receiver, and message type of the existing routing notifications.

If a matching routing notification is found, Adapter for SAP processes the message as the routing notification indicates. If a routing notification is not defined for the message, processing of the message will be aborted with an exception thrown.

The routing notification identifies a transport, which indicates how and where a message is to be routed. The transports you can specify allow you to route a message to a service, route an IDoc to an SAP system via tRFC, route an RFC/BAPI to an SAP system via RFC/tRFC, or post an IDoc-XML, RFC-XML, or bXML message to a URL.