New Features in ABAP 7.4 – Enhanced Search Helps

The New ABAP Debugger User Interface and how to customize the user interface.

The tools of the New ABAP Debugger are optimized for the different debugging situations you may have to deal with during the course of solving a problem. Some of the tools you will recognize from the Classic ABAP Debugger; others are brand new. Before we look at a few of the tools and how to use them, lets first get comfortable with the tools menu and how the tools are organized.

With all their new features, the latest versions of the ABAP Editor, I thought it best to appreciate the new features; we should first go back in time to see some of the limitations that were present in prior versions of the editor.

SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (formerly 2004s) offers the new Enhancement Framework that not only is intended to unify the modification and classic enhancement techniques, but also offers you almost the same flexibility as modifications without the limitations of modifications.

In contrast to enhancements in the Enhancement Framework, modifications are physically part of the object they modify. This means that every single modification gets lost in an upgrade and needs to be re-inserted even in cases where the underlying SAP object has not changed at all!

In all the aspects, enhancements are more powerful than modifications, even given all the modification support that transaction SPAU offers. The reason is due to an important difference between an enhancement and a modification that stems from the conceptual difference between the two technologies.

In addition to the new kernel-based BAdI, there are many other types of enhancement options that are part of the new Enhancement Framework. You implement these enhancements using the Enhancement Framework tools, which are integrated into the ABAP Workbench

No matter if you create an enhancement point or a BAdI as an enhancement option provider, or if you implement an existing enhancement option (be it implicit or explicit), what you create must fit into the structure of the Enhancement Framework in a way that enables you to collect and organize the enhancement options and their counterparts on the implementation side.

Let’s review some of the technical aspects of controls technology:

-The SAP Control Framework

-The Automation Queue, and the issues surrounding “flushing” it

-Event handling

-Error handling

Including Controls Technology controls on the front-end establishes a client/server relationship between the application server and the controls on the presentation server.

The Controls Technology Framework resides on the application server (the back-end), and the Automation Controller sits on the presentation server (the front-end). The integral component that optimizes the communication between the two is the Automation Queue.

I will continue to take a look at the SAP Controls Technology and how we can use it in our development. I will focus on Events and their respective handling techniques along with errors.

The ALV Grid Control solves this problem. Its user interface provides a set of generic functions (e.g., sorting, filtering) for handling tabular data. It also confers the many benefits of controls technology to users, enabling more operations by mouse, and interaction with other controls, such as drag-and-drop. Developers simply plug the ALV Grid Control into their applications and the tool takes care of the rest. You do not need to do any further programming to offer users these functions. How you “plug” the control into an application is the first thing I will show you in this month’s blog. So lets get started!

he key to configuring the ALV Grid Control for your particular application is the structures that are passed by the application to an ALV Grid instance before or during list display. For some simple extensions of your ALV Grid instance, you only need to set the right parameter and pass the table or structure by using method set_table_for_first_display.

Adding new GUI elements to an ALV Grid instance is event-controlled and requires experience in ABAP Objects event handling. There is an event for each element type (toolbar push button, toolbar menu, and context menu). In the relevant event handler method, you define the properties of an element (such as its menu options) and assign a function code to each executable function.

What is web Dynpro? It’s SAP’s newest user interface (UI) development option for the SAP NetWeaver platform — has been designed to become the de facto option of choice for SAP development. Web Dynpro was created because, like every other software vendor in the Web space, SAP needed a longterm, strategic solution for the many problems faced by Web developers during the implementation of browser-based business applications.