ABAP Objects Role in SAP Programming John Benson

ABAP Objects Role in SAP Shifting landscape –ABAP is shifting from a pure procedural language to an Object Oriented (OO) language ALV Grid (a primary reporting tool) now has two class based implementations and the advanced training offered by SAP for ALV is available for the ALV Object Model (class based) User exits are being converted from function based (procedural) to BADI (OO) with direct support added to language (GET BADI for example) Runtime identification shifted from DDIC functions to runtime classes (abstract class cl_abap_typedescr is root) All major components now allow class based exceptions (OO) to include function modules, forms Contract based development shifting to ABAP Interfaces (OO) vice function modules (over 8,000 ABAP Object interfaces in ERP 5.0) Critical implementation sections such as HTML, Web Service, and XML are all now based on ABAP Objects for the SAP implementations –Web proxies are all ABAP Object based Non-OO compatible constructs (such as tables statement) are disparaged (OO compatible constructs have been introduced as a replacement) Critical language elements commonly used on OO languages have been introduced to ABAP (such as regular expressions) SAP Workflow was pseudo OO based and now has transitioned to heavily OO based –The SAP Workflow runtime environment is now based on a series of classes and interfaces – procedure exits for workflow are now also all OO based The Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern is now heavily used and the implementations all require ABAP Objects (CRM is now primarily a MVC application)

ABAP Objects in SAP Shifting Focus (see next slide for course map) –SAP provided training classes now list the ABAP Objects (BC401) course as directly following ABAP Workbench Foundations (BC400) and preceding Advanced ABAP (BC402) ABAP Objects was first introduced as an add on course - ABAP Objects (BC401) is a prerequisite for courses such as BC405 – Programming ABAP Reports BC425 – Enhancements and Modifications –Java development stack introduced Java is an OO based language –Several.NET (C#) enhancements for SAP interoperability have been introduced to Microsoft Visual Studio Allows programming to be offloaded from SAP into.NET –These changes make it easier for the large pool of OO trained programmers (C++, C#, Java, …) to transition to SAP programming Microsoft has more than a million registered OO based developers for example –Web services and Service Oriented Architecture are ABAP Objects based –XML and XSLT transformations are centered around ABAP Objects classes and XSLT extensions commonly call ABAP Object class methods Communication with other systems/programming languages (such as.NET) are primarily XML based SharePoint (standard architecture at LyondellBasell now) is heavily XML based

Comparison of Functions to Class Methods SAP documentation compares a function group to a class and function modules to class methods –Shown below is the distribution of function modules to methods in ERP 5.0 (6.4) and BW (newer version at 7.0) –Methods are predominant with a similar percentage shown for function groups to class/interfaces –Function modules are becoming primarily the shell for RFC connections (body is commonly comprised of ABAP Object based programming)

Class Pool (class) Function Groups Interface Pool (class interface) Count queries

Function Groups Count queries