ABAP Mentor

Introduction

As you complete this course, you will acquire the necessary knowledge to plan and construct ABAP Dictionary objects in your SAP system, and you will be able to create and manage a central meta-data repository for your database that reduces the redundancy, the maintenance costs, and improves the efficiency. After the course, you can apply this knowledge whether you work on a simple in-house development, or a complex project.

Overview

Right now, I'm pretty close to finish my first Pluralsight course, called Understanding ABAP Dictionary. As I mentioned the title of the blog post series, I want to share you 3 Things You Should Know About ABAP Dictionary, and we have already talked about two: Meta-Data Consistency and Data Consistency.

Today, it's the time to talk about the third one, named Reusability. If you think about the reusability a bit, then you recognize that it carries both the Meta-Data and the Data consistency itself by default. This is because, if we reuse our Domains, Data Elements, Structures, Table Types and so on, then probably it's much-much easier provide Meta-Data and Data consistency, since we reuse the different objects, so we need to maintain less objects, and we probably make fewer mistakes and typos also.

There is one more benefit of reusing our building blocks in the ABAP Dictionary: you can save both time and money!

Overview

In the last few months, I have been working on my new Pluralsight course, called Understanding ABAP Dictionary that is about introducing you the basic concepts of the ABAP Dictionary in a very simple way, using illustrative examples.

Today, I decided to share you a few thoughts from this course that can be helpful in your ABAP Developments. As an ABAP Developer, if we are responsible for the database layer, then the goal is to create flexible, consistent, and centralized databases that serves data for many application. Our databases have to be flexible for the future changes, consistent in order to provide high-quality data, and centralized to decrease the implementation and maintenance costs.

Today, we are going to focus on the consistency, and within that the meta-data consistency.

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.