ABAP Mentor

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

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.