Logging Calls to your Gateway Service: SICF (for beginners)

Something which has come in very useful for me when using Gateway is the Logging functionality. On the project I’m currently working on the UI developers are from a different company and working out what they’re doing can be tricky. My colleague and I have set up our gateway service, and the UI guys are making the calls we’ve exposed to them.. but are they making them correctly? Are they making all the calls required?

When system testing it has given me peace of mind to be able to check the calls being made by the front end developers. When bugs have been raised I have been able to identify, using SICF, when the issues have been caused by incorrect or missing calls to our service.

This is a brief blog to explain (for those who are new to Gateway) how to use SICF for logging gateway calls, and how to use this to your advantage.

1. Log in to your Gateway system and navigate to TCode SICF

2. Click execute and expand the list until you get to your service
default_host->sap->opu->odata->sap->”service name”

3. Click (once) onto your service, so it’s highlighted, then activate a recording
Edit->Recorder->Activate Recording

There are 5 parts to make a selection for:
1 User: I select “All Users”, but if you know who the Gateway user is you can specify it directly
2 Record time: If you don’t want to have to come back and de-activate this you can set this to a very specific time frame (I usually leave it as default, and manually deactivate the recording)
3 Lifetime: How long do you want to be able to see these recordings for? After a time all entries will be deleted, so if you’re using the recording, for example, to make a point in a meeting, make sure you set the lifetime long enough, or you will find all your recordings deleted
4 URL Path: this will be auto-populated based on the service you selected. If it is BLANK then you didn’t select a service yet.
5 Request and Response is usually more useful

Once you’re ready, hit activate: now, any calls made to Gateway (by your specified user) will be recorded.

I tend to set this up, make some gateway calls and then immediately deactivate the recorder (as it has a maximum number of entries at 100 – and this can be reached very quickly in our system)

4. Deactivate the Recorder: Edit->Recorder->Deactivate Recording

5. To View your recordings: select the service again. Edit->Recorder->Display Recordings
If you left the recorder running for a while you might specify a time here, but if (like me) you want to see everything, don’t change any setting and click execute

7. To see details of any gateway call: select it, click the little glasses icon, select “in new session”

And there you have it – a simple way to track the calls made to your gateway service!

I hope this is helpful to those of you new to Gateway – I know it was useful to me.