Introduction to ABAP

BAP stands for - Advanced Business Application Programming.It is  a programming language for developing applications for the SAP R/3 system.

The latest version of ABAP is  called  ABAP Objects and supports object-oriented programming. SAP will run applications written using ABAP/4, the earlier ABAP version, as well as applications using ABAP Objects.

Without further adieu , lets dive into ABAP.

Note, this tutorial will not go into extensive details on ABAP language constructs (which become very boring to read ) but quickly introduce key concepts to get you started so you can focus your attention on more important topics.

Data Types

Syntax to declare a variable in ABAP -

DATA Variable_Name Type Variable_Type

Example:

DATA employee_number Type I.

The following is a list of Data Types supported by ABAP

Data Type	Initial field length	Valid field length	Initial value	Meaning
Numeric types
I	4	4	0	Integer (whole number)
F	8	8	0	Floating point number
P	8	1 - 16	0	Packed number
Character types
C	1	1 - 65535	' ... '	Text field(alphanumeric characters)
D	8	8	'00000000'	Date field(Format: YYYYMMDD)
N	1	1 - 65535	'0 ... 0'	Numeric text field(numeric characters)
T	6	6	'000000'	Time field(format: HHMMSS)
Hexadecimal type
X	1	1 - 65535	X'0 ... 0'	Hexadecimal field

Processing Data - Assigning Values

a=16.

move 16 to a.

write a to b.

- Arithmetic Operations

compute a = a*100.

Control Statements

Following control statements can be used - - If ... EndIf Loop

if [not] exp [ and / or [not] exp ].
........
[elseif exp.
.......]
[else.
.......]
Endif.

- Case statement

Case variable.
when value1.
.........
when value2.
.........
[ when others.
.........]
Endcase.
Do.

-While loop

While <logical expression>.

.....

.....

Endwhile.

- Do loop

Do <n> times.

.....

.....

Enddo.

Logical Operator

A list of logical operators

• GE or >=
• GT or >
• LE or <=
• LT or <
• EQ or =
• NE or <>

ABAP/4 Editor

Finally , here is where you will spent most of your time as a developer creating / modifying programs. Transaction SE38