ST was created by an SAP declarative language that allows serialization and deserialization between XML formats and ABAP data. Most SAP developers have heard about ST at least once, but only a few have chance to use it in a real project. This is probably due to a lack of working examples on the internet and some additional difficulties described in this chapter. Before using ST, you should take into consideration the following constraints:
- It's only allowed to transform between two formats of ABAP data and XML but not between XML, and XML, or ABAP and ABAP.
- To find a problem in ST, you have to use an ST debugger. This is much more limiting compared with an ABAP debugger.
- You can only transform value-based data, such as fields, structures, or internal tables. You are not able to work with references.
From another point of view, using ST also has a lot of advantages:
- It's a declarative language, but still very simple to use and understand.
- Transformations work both...