SAP Archives

18 Techniques for Locating the Underlying Data of a Screen Field

SAP’s three-tiered architecture is the backbone of an R/3 infrastructure. It’s what makes an R/3 system flexible, reliable, and open, all at the same time. It’s also what makes locating underlying data, at times, so inherently difficult. For example, when you need several fields from a transaction for a report or an enhancement, you will...…
Enabling Point-and-Click Data Entry Assistance for Your BAPI Applications

Within SAPGUI, facilities that help users enter data are known as Input Help. In simple cases, SAPGUI’s Input Help presents the user with a list of codes and descriptions. For more complex object types, Match Codes are used to enable the user to search on more expansive sets of criteria. You can provide a similar...…
Is It Time to Revisit Your SAP Security Infrastructure?

All too often SAP implementation projects don’t take security beyond the application level, where security and authorization are often regarded as one and the same. To ensure adequate protection, security measures must be factored into all layers of the SAP infrastructure. With their client/server architecture, SAP systems include many components that exchange information, each of...…
A Developer’s Guide to the New ALV Grid Control

Within an SAP system there is a lot of data that needs to be reviewed, maintained, and interpreted. Granted, the effort to create a classical list for just simple output of data is minimal, but amass a few lists across a few applications, each created by a different developer, and users may find they have...…
Defining SAP Service Level Agreements: An IT Manager’s Survival Guide

Given the complexity and investment inherent in large SAP environments, it is quite likely that you and your IT colleagues are being asked to measure and ensure a certain level of service for users of your SAP systems. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) can be of enormous benefit, because it directly addresses a core frustration...…
Need to Understand a BAPI’s Parameters? Test-Drive the BAPI Inside SAP!

To write a BAPI-enabled application, you must understand all the relevant parameters of every BAPI you want to use in your application. This article shows you how to test-drive a BAPI inside R/3’s test environment in order to accelerate the learning process. Without writing source code, you can find out which parameters, in which combination,...…
Everything a BAPI Programmer Needs to Know About the Business Object Repository

Trying to develop or use SAP’s Business Application Programming Interfaces (BAPIs) without a solid understanding of what they are, how they are defined in the Business Object Repository (BOR), and what the difference between a BAPI and the ABAP Function Module underneath is, leads to errors and frustration. Beginners are often confounded as to how...…
Dynamic Documents: Completing the New Face of Reporting

Screen programming and list programming used to occupy two different worlds. Controls programming changed that. The ALV Grid Control allows you to replace tabular lists with control-based tables on screens, and the SAP Tree Control provides a new way of displaying hierarchical lists. But how can you display unstructured output in a control-based environment? Starting...…
Write Costing-Based CO-PA Reports Your Readers Will Trust — Five Secret Tricks to Building General Ledger Reconciliation into Your ‘Profitability Analysis’ Data

Section 1 of this article is especially for people who consider themselves CBR (Confused Beyond Recognition) by R/3’s “distributed” approach to accounting.1 Section 2 expands on this topic while specifically identifying some needed background information for examining CO-PA report challenges. Section 3 puts a finger on both some well-known and some not-so-well-known integration trouble spots...…
COM4ABAP: A Simpler, Cleaner, Universal Approach to Harnessing COM Objects in ABAP

The SAP DCOM Connector allows communication between an R/3 system and an external application via the “outside-in” approach, but there are times when you will actually need the process to work in the opposite direction. While this was possible in the past, it was by no means easy! Now, with Release 4.6D of the RFC...…