What is the relationship between ALE and Middleware In SAP?

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a term for the transfer of business messages between two systems.

There are many such messages, the most common of these include a customer sending a purchase order message to a vendor, or a vendor sending an invoice message to a customer. Classic EDI is mainly restricted on the exchange of transactional data, no master data or configuration data.

In most cases, EDI replaces the transfer of paper copies of these documents. Via the messages ALE business processes can be implemented between business partners. The EDI messages also use the ALE services.

For the communication between different types of systems special EDI messages are defined as standards for inter company communication.

There are many standards for these messages - in the United States, the ANSI X.12 standard is the most prevalent, in Europe, the UN/EDIFACT standard is used.

For sending EDI messages the information has to be converted into an EDI standard. With SAP systems this is done by EDI subsystems.

This conversion is the only difference between EDI messages and other messages used in ALE business processes. The processing of these messages on the SAP System is the same as the processing of other ALE messages.