Background
I've been working with ABAP in on premise systems since about 2001 and this won't change (much) in the next couple of years. Right now, the systems I'm mostly active in are on Netweaver 7.50 with EHP8 and SP29. Most of the ABAP-code I write or maintain revolves around data retrieval from database tables and bringing it into a useful ALV-format for the users. Depending on the task at hand I utilize SAP GUI transactions like SE80, SE11 and the like or the ADT in Eclipse. For the tutorials I worked in a sandbox system. All in all, you might call me an "ABAPosaurus", a term made popular by @Jelena several years ago as apparent in the search-results for the term.
Why work through an ABAP Beginner Tutorial?
My reasons for paying a visit to the Tutorial Navigator were twofold:
- See how I could do some basic activities in the ADT instead of SAP GUI
- Find out what I could actually do with ADT given our somewhat old NW 7.50 system and that the tutorial had this as one of the pre-requisites: "You have a valid instance of an on-premise AS ABAP server, version 7.51 or higher (some ABAP Development Tools may not be available in earlier versions)"
What did I find out?
Worth remembering
For my exercise I picked the mission Get Started with ABAP Development on-Premise. All the activities related to ABAP code worked well, be it for a report program or class. While working through the tutorials I picked up some ADT options and functionality I hadn't often used or noticed before:
- always remember to use Ctrl+Space to get code completion proposals (anybody else having a hard-time remembering all those different key-combinations, cheat-sheets like this one not-withstanding?!?)
- use Ctrl+1 to open the Quick Fix/Assist menu and see what's on offer, like creating a new global class or method in it - basically, what in SAP GUI would be "forward navigation".
- use Ctrl+1 to convert an inline internal table declaration to an explicit one based on the SELECT-statement
As I usually just go to SE16 to look at table content, utilizing the built-in data preview in the ADT was new for me. What may come in handy one of these days (and if I can remember it!), are the options available via the SQL console, especially in order to help create JOIN SELECTs to then be used in the code. I'll certainly have to dabble with that a bit more when I have a use-case for it.
A mixed bag when it comes to data dictionary objects
Not too surprisingly given our backend system, I was less successful when the tutorials asked me to create certain data dictionary entities. When I started the creation of a database table from within the ADT, I could only enter the new name but then had to do everything else in a GUI-tab. So I couldn't really work through the tutorial steps where fields and annotations are edited as code but had to do that the old way in SE11.
The creation of data elements worked from within ADT. However, given that other dictionary types will not work via that route for as long as we are on NW 750, I'll just keep relying on SE11 for all of that - unless I'll have to create a CDS-view of course!
Other observations
What could be a helpful feature are ABAPDoc comments but only somewhat as the need to use actual HTML-tags in the comments if you want to have them synchronized with the GUI backend (i.e. <p class="shorttext synchronized">...</p>) renders the comments less readable as the could or should be. Ideally, the synchronization would be the default and simply happen without having to specify it explicitly.
I also ran into small issues when I tried to make use of the ABAP Flight Reference Scenario model entities as those are not available in NW750. I got around that by utilizing other but comparable data elements. Not quite sure why different sections of the same mission are based on different demo models as this does add some friction while working through them. Using just one of them throughout would make it easier - at least for me.
My take-aways
For me, it was well worth the time to work through this beginner level mission even if only to better understand what and how I can already do from within the ADT in Eclipse with our NW 750 backend system.
Do you have similar experiences and/or use cases? If yes, please share them in the comments!
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