ABAP Mentor

THE CHALLENGE IS OVER.

I hope you enjoyed watching the SAP: Getting Started course last week.

If you are interested in other SAP courses, then participate on our SAP: Getting Started Challenge this Thursday, 14th of January, 2016.

Answer 3 questions from the course, and if you are among the first 25 people with correct answers, you will get a 1 MONTH FREE pass to Pluralsight.

SAP: Getting Started - Coming Soon

Have you ever wondered about to start learning SAP? ... but you have not even started it yet, because others always say “learning SAP is hard”?

If you just start with SAP or you just want to deepen your knowledge of SAP, then you are in the right place!

I am happy to announce that my newest SAP online training for beginners will be available soon on the very popular online training platform, called Pluralsight.

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.

In the previous post, we finished our framework program that is able to call our previously constructed Simple Transformation to parse the content of the XML into SAP database table, ZCUSTOMER.

Today, I want to share you another challenging use case for processing XML documents, namely how to process XML attributes in the XML document using Simple Transformation. It may sound a bit difficult, but we will see that SAP makes our job really easy. We can perform all mentioned operation below via the source code editor or the visual editor. As you got familiar with the visual editor in the previous posts, now I am going to demonstrate the steps in the source code editor (Note: it doesn't matter which IDE you use, it has the same effect).

Main responsibilities

We did a great job with the Simple Transformations, so from now on we are ready to call it from the framework program. To make it simpler, first I am going to introduce the main responsibilities of the framework program: first let's upload the content of the XML file, then parse this content into an SAP internal format, and at last insert the parsed data into the database. I like to write transparent codes, so we are going to use subroutines to separate these different responsibilities, and keep our code readable. We are going to construct three subroutines, namely UPLOAD_XML, PARSE_XML, and INSERT_INTO_DATABASE.

Create the Simple Transformation

As we are ready with creating ABAP Dictionary objects, let’s move on, and open the transaction, called STRANS to create the Simple Transformation that will parse the content of the XML document into the internal format of the SAP. In the Transformation Editor, first let’s give a name to our transformation like ZCUSTOMER_ST, and hit the Create button.

Overview

In the previous post, I have already introduced a high-level development workflow, so now there is nothing left then perform the first step, namely creating the ABAP Dictionary objects.

Introduction to XML

Today, it is very common business request to exchange data between different external systems. It can be a problem that those systems usually store their data in incompatible formats. To make this exchange process much easier, it’s usual to use a plain text format such as XML. XML provides a standardized format, so a result those systems can communicate with each other in only one specified language, what everybody easily understands.

Since the XML is a well-known markup language, most of the programming languages are capable to process XML files and provide various tools to transform their content to an internal format of the given system. If you want to learn more about XML, visit the website: www.w3schools.com.