Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) is an established and complex programming language in the IT industry. This book will be your guide to becoming an industry expert in Systems, Applications, Products (SAP) ABAP. You will learn how to write custom code that is suited for the latest version of SAP ABAP as well as the older versions of SAP. By exploring practical examples, you will learn how to make user-friendly interfaces and will uncover various ways to optimize your ABAP code.
This book is for developers who want to learn and use ABAP skills in order to become an industry expert. Familiarity with object-oriented programming concepts is expected.
Chapter 1, Creating Custom Code, focuses on available actions for changing SAP systems within the modern and ever-changing SAP wold.
Chapter 2, The Basic Structure of ABAP, focuses on the distinction between ABAP and modern programming languages.
Chapter 3, Database Access in ABAP, describes how to extract data from a database in ABAP.
Chapter 4, Import and Export to Document Formats, focuses on the toolset the ABAP developer has for importing and exporting data to/from different environments.
Chapter 5, Exposing Data to Print Forms, explains how to represent extracted data in a user-friendly print form, how to make it clearly readable, and how to make its maintenance less time-consuming.
Chapter 6, ABAP and XML, deals with the different tools ABAP has for XML manipulation, their performance features, and what real-life scenarios they are intended for.
Chapter 7, Building User Interfaces, focuses on how to build classical Dynpro with the help of ABAP tools. It explains what screen types exist and how they are interconnected with each other, what GUI controls ABAP developers have in their toolset, and which of them are recommended and which are not. It also describes ABAP List Viewer (ALV) controls and the ALV component model.
Chapter 8, Creating Stunning UI5 Interfaces, places UI5 in the family of SAP interfaces and explains how to use it in the most efficient way.
Chapter 9, Business Object Processing Framework, gives an overview of Business Object Processing Framework (BOPF) and explains why it is important in SAP environments for the acceleration of development, easier maintenance, and supportability.
Chapter 10, Modification and Customization Techniques, describes the customization techniques across SAP modules, explaining which techniques are recommended to use and which are outdated.
Chapter 11, Handling Exceptions in ABAP, covers testing exceptions in ABAP, the types of exception that have existed from the beginning, and the types we have now. It also recommends the proper way of handling exceptions, explaining in which situations it is strongly required, and those in which it is not recommended.
Chapter 12, Testing ABAP Programs, explains how to test ABAP programs for performance without sacrificing the clarity of ABAP code and how to use the ABAP Debugger correctly to find bottlenecks and speed up ABAP programs.
Chapter 13, Advanced Techniques in ABAP Objects, deals with the advantages ABAP objects bring to the development process.
Chapter 14, Integrating SAP with Third-Party Systems, focuses on how to build a stable and error-prone connection of a SAP system with non-SAP software.
Chapter 15, Background Processing of ABAP Programs, reveals all the ins and outs of background data processing in SAP that you may face, and the approaches that are used to handle with them.
Chapter 16, Performance and Optimization of ABAP, provides a thorough review of the available ABAP toolset for testing the performance of ABAP apps and tuning their execution. It also gives some best practice tips and tricks of internal ABAP statements and focuses on tracing and tuning OpenSQL selections.
The reader should know the basics of programming, as well as the basics of SQL and operations on databases. Basic knowledge of business processes will also be helpful. This book also deals with the subject of UI5; therefore, it is worth the reader knowing the basics of JavaScript.
To create code in ABAP, the readers also need access to SAP systems with the developer key.
To create applications in UI5, the readers should create a trial account in the SAP Cloud Platform. The SAP Web IDE Full-Stack developer environment is available there. The programming environment allows you to create and extend SAP applications on a full stack for browsers and mobile devices.
You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.
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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-SAP-ABAP. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781787288942_ColorImages.pdf.
Visit the following link to check out videos of the code being run: http://bit.ly/2M4ILyK.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In the Details window, create lines %C1 and %C2 with the values that are shown in the following screenshot."
A block of code is set as follows:
<script
id="sap-ui-bootstrap"
src="resources/sap-ui-core.js"
data-sap-ui-libs="sap.m"
data-sap-ui-theme="sap_belize">
</script>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
data-sap-ui-bindingSyntaxt="complex"
data-sap-ui-resourceroots='{ "my.namespace":"./" }'Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mkdir css $ cd css
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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