Lecture 4Local Data Types and Definitions

BCO5647 Applications Programming Techniques (ABAP)

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Readings & Objectives

Readings

Keller & Kruger Chapter 4Pages 87 – 103

Objectives

This lecture will

Introduce Local Data Types in ABAP

Identify the ten Elementary Data Types in ABAP

Examine User-defined Data Types

Introduce the Structure concept with local and global definitions.

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Local Data - Data Type

A data field in ABAP is a variable which cannot be broken up intosmaller parts.

All data fields that are to be used in a program must be defined before

their first use.

Data fields in an ABAP program have a type.

E.g. You can define a data field student_name of type character andlength 25 as:

data student_name(25) type c.

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Local Data: Elementary Data Types

There are ten “built-in” data types in ABAP.

Since SAP R/3 4.6 ABAP offers two variable length built-in elementary data types STRING and XSTRING:

DATA: text-string TYPE stringtext-string = ‘ABAP programming is FUN!’

XSTRING can contain the hexadecimal content of a byte sequence.

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Elementary Data Types

data: name(25) type c, city(25), flag.

data: student_id(7) type n value ‘6980’.

write student_id.

data: book_price type p decimals 2.

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User-defined Data Types

You can make reference to an existing variable using like.

data: customer_name(25) type c, vendor_name like customer_name,

carridcode like spfli-carrid.

You can create your own data types and apply them to variables.

types: t_name(25) type c.

data: customer_name type t_name,vendor_name type t_name,carridcode type s_carr_id.

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Structure

Structures consist of a series of variables grouped together under a commonname.

Structures are defined using the keywords begin of and end of.

data: begin of customer,id(8) type n,fname(12),lname(15),

end of customer.

customer-id = ‘12345678’.customer-fname = ‘Christain’.customer-lname = ‘Wong’.

write / customer.write: / customer-id, customer-fname, customer-lname.

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Structure

You can define a structure type locally using the TYPE statement.

Structures can be used to set up a work area to store database table record.