ABAP Mentor

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.

Overview

In the last few lessons, we talked about the BSP application itself, the data retrieval in JSON, and how to handle URL parameters. Today, I want to give some help to the developers, who want to retrieve their data simply in XML. To achieve this, we are going to perform a few modifications only.

Today lessons

How to retrieve data in XML format

Overview

In the previous posts, we built a very simple BSP application that we used to retrieve a simple, hard-coded JSON. Then we went ahead, and we replaced this hard-coded JSON in code using a simple SELECT statement, and a JSON transformation.

Today, we move on and talk about how to pass parameters to our web service in order to pass a filtered data back to the client. We are going to solve these requirements using Page Attributes.

Today lessons

How to pass parameters to the service

Overview

In the previous post, we built a very simple BSP application that we used to retrieve a simple, hard-coded JSON. Today, we go ahead, and talk about how we can produce this hard-coded JSON in code. In order to do this, I'm going to introduce you the Event Handlers in Pages with Flow Logic.

Today lessons

What are the available Event Handlers
How to produce JSON in ABAP 7.4

Overview

Today, I want to share a very handy approach with you about building simple web services in SAP. It's a lightweight alternative to the SOAP web services. I mostly try to avoid building SOAP web services, since they provide very thick interfaces, always need to regenerate the proxies and so on, so it can be a nightmare in complex cases (at least for me). I usually prefer building RESTful web services using the SAP Netweaver Gateway, but what if I don't have it?

To demonstrate the approach, we are going to build a simple web service that uses JSON format and deals with flight schedules.

Today lesson

How to build a simple one-page BSP Application in SAP

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.