ABAP Mentor

After I published the previous post Simple way to generate deep XML in ABAP, many of you indicated that would learn about the XML to ABAP mapping as well.

Recently I got a question from one of my reader, Rakesh. He wanted to generate a deep XML from ABAP using the data in the SAP tables. He asked me to help how to do it in ABAP. In this post, I will share with you my solution for this problem.

Overview

I got a lots of questions for my previous post, Where Can You Find Your ABAP Source Code?. You asked me about what theme I use when I work in ABAP Workbench. A few of you really liked the dark theme, I used during the recordings. This is a custom font and color scheme.

Overview

SAP stores your ABAP code in the database. But what does it actually mean? Let me explain this on an example.

How to Make Your Life Difficult in Three Different Ways?

As an ABAP developer, writing ABAP programs is easy as 1 + 1. First, we learn the basic syntax, then - as a next step - we try to modify code written by other developers, and finally we write our first ABAP program independently. That’s it!

There is no difference, even if we talk about ABAP Dictionary: we learn the basic features of ABAP Dictionary – we learn how to create domains, data elements, or database tables – then we try to modify objects created by others, and finally we build our very first structure, database tables, or view. This is the learning curve that a beginner ABAP Developer usually follows.

Overview

Alright, now we arrived to our last 7.4 release news post (for a while), namely the Support Package Stack 08, that gives us additional new features and extends existing ones. Of course, there are many of them again, but as you already know, I will only demonstrate you the most interesting ones, that are the followings:

• predicative method calls >> using predicate methods within logical expressions
  [IF order->is_closed( ) ...],
  
• internal table filtering >> selecting or removing rows effectively from an internal table
  [DATA(...) = FILTER #( ... USING KEY ... WHERE ... )],
  
• new way of defining fields list in SELECT >> listing fields easily in a complex SELECT
  [SELECT scarr~carrname spfli~* sflight~fldate],
  
• inline declaration for SELECT >> storing data from the database without defining internal tables
  [SELECT ... INTO TABLE @DATA(flight_schedules)].
  

Overview

Here we go again, another week, another Support Package Stack also! As you remember, in the previous post we have talked about the new features of the ABAP 7.4 SP02, and today I want to continue this habit and talk about the new features of the 7.4 SP05. We are going to talk about very powerful features, like: how to make component-by-component assignments of two very different structures, how to build the content of an internal table based on another internal table, and at last what the SQL Expression are in ABAP.

Overview

In the last few posts, I demonstrated you some new features of the 7.4 Release in detail: the different Inline Declarations (DATA or FIELD-SYMBOL), the VALUE and NEW Constructor Expressions, or the Table Expressions.

Today, I want to do a bit different, than before. For this, I have collected the best improvements of our ABAP language in the Support Package 02, and I would like to share it with you in a single post.

Overview

I hope, you are also satisfied with the new features of the 7.4 Release, you could have try out the different Inline Declarations (DATA or FIELD-SYMBOL), or you got the feeling of using the VALUE and NEW Constructor Expressions.

Today, we will deep dive into another topic, named Table Expressions. We can think of the table expressions as the short form for the READ TABLE statement.

All I can say is, that I was very happy, when I first heard about table expressions, because I just worked on a complex XML parser ABAP program, that used Simple Transformation to parse a really deep and complex XML structure. I made good use of the table expression, when I had to expand the deep structure into a simple flat structure.

So, what are the table expressions?

Overview

In the last two blog posts, we have talked about how inline declarations (DATA, FIELD-SYMBOL) can make our code thinner, more readable and transparent.

Today, we go ahead, and continue examining the new features of the 7.4 Release, and talk about the Constructor Expressions.