ABAP Tutorial

ABAP is a special programming language used by SAP only. The full form of ABAP is Advanced Business Application Programming. This language is created by the company SAP itself. It is used for the modification and other development works for the customization purposes as per the user requirements. Trained SAP ABAP professionals called ABAP developers or SAP Technical Consultants are doing this job. The major works with ABAP are for creating the customized reports than the standard reports included in SAP products.

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Initially ABAP was the only programming language used for the things. But now they are supporting both ABAP and JAVA in latest Netweaver Platforms. The syntax of ABAP will almost look like COBOL programming language which is mainly used in Mainframes.

ABAP codes are not stored in different files like other languages. Instead of that they are stored in databases in two forms. One with ABAP source code which we can edit and other in ABAP generated code somewhat like a compiled source code in C++ or like Kava bytecode.

We can use a special name called Transaction Code (Tcode) for running an ABAP program instantly. For that a particular transaction code will be assigned to each ABAP programs to execute. For example we can use the transaction code VA01 for executing the ABAP program for Sales order Creation. Several standard transaction codes are there in SAP by default. We can enter the transaction code in command field of a SAP screen.

Executable and non-executable ABAP programs are there. Non-executables ABAP programs are for re-usability and calling in other executable ABAP programs. There are two types of executable programs, they are

Report
Module pools

In simple words we can explain this as reports are the basic ABAP program which displaying the data without any user interaction and Module pools are complex programs than reports and will display the data with user interaction.

The transaction code SE38 is used for opening the ABAP editor for our programming purposes. An ABAP program will look like as follows

REPORT TEST.

WRITE ‘This is my First Program’.

This program will simply display “This is my First program” in screen. REPORT statement means that it’s a Report type ABAP program. PROGRAM statement is using for module pool programs. The name of the program is followed after this statement. In this example TEST is the name of this program. Note a period symbol (.) at end of each line. Every ABAP statements should end with a period symbol.

ABAP Objects are the methodology used for Object Oriented programming in ABAP.There are many other things like internal tables, Dictionary Objects, ABAP keywords etc to get more details about ABAP. These things are described in detail in our other tutorials.

Tutorials Index

Part 1: ABAP Basic

Part 2 : ABAP DATA Dictionary

Part 3 : Document Formatting Tools

Part 4 : Data Uploading Tools

Part 5 : ABAP Syntax & Keywords

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