Beginners Guide To ABAP – Module 2 – Data Dictionary – Create A Table Part 4

This is last video covering SAP Table Creation. You can watch the previous video here: Create A SAP Table Part 3. Watch that video first.

Field: Date Of Birth

The last final field that we’re going to create is ‘Date of Birth’. Create data element ‘ZDOB’. Use forward navigation to create it, saving the table along the way and choosing ‘Yes’ to create the data element. Enter ‘Date of Birth Data Element’ for the short text.

For the Domain, once again enter ZDOB and use forward navigation to create the domain and choose ‘Yes’ to save the data element. Assign it to the ‘local object’ and choose ‘Yes’ to create the domain. Enter ‘Date of Birth’ in the short text field.

Now, for the Data Type, ‘date of birth’ is a date field so we want to choose the appropriate date field from the drop-down box. Press the F4 key to bring up the drop-down box and choose the entry that says ‘DATS’. Press the enter key and you can see an information box has popped up just to tell us the attributes of the DATS field have been assigned to this domain.

Click the Continue button and it will fill in the number of characters for us and the Output length. The Output length is different from the number of characters because it will actually insert the ‘back slash’ to separate the days, months and years of this field. Activate the object and assign it to the local object development class.

Ensure your domain is selected in the inactive objects window and choose ‘Continue’. Then check the status bar to ensure everything is activated and saved successfully. Then press the F3 key to step back.

On your data elements field go to ‘Field label’ and enter ‘Date of Birth’ in every field. The whole text ‘Date of Birth’ will not fit in the short description so replace it with ‘DOB’. Press enter to automatically fill in the field label length then activate your data element.

Once the object has been activated and saved successfully press the F3 key to step back and there you can see all of your fields have been entered into your table. If all the short texts, and individual data element, and domain properties have come through onto your screen that indicates everything is working just fine.

The next thing we want to do is just click the Save button so we can just save our progress.

SAP Data Dictionary: Maintain Technical Settings

Next we are going to move on to maintain the technical settings for our table. SAP needs to know a little bit more information about the table that we are creating before it can create the back end database tables itself. So you can either click on the ‘Technical settings’ button on the toolbar or go to the ‘Go to’ menu and choose the ‘Technical settings’ option or just Ctrl+Shift+F9.

We now need to tell our system what development class we want to use. So if you click the drop down button, you’ll see that there are five options to choose from and if you just read the descriptions you’ll get a flavor of what this is all about. We want to choose the first entry which is APPL0, which identifies this table is holding master data and a transparent table. Double click that entry.

For the ‘Size category’ field click the drop down again. In this table we are just estimating to the system how many records we are going to be holding in the table and it will use these values to make an educated guess of how it should actually create the tables in the underlying database. We are not going to be holding a lot of data in our table so just choose the first option which is Size category 0.

Once selected, now we’ll move down to the buffering options and we want to ensure that Buffering not allowed is selected. What this means is basically do not load the table content into memory for reading, which prevents the table from being read in advance when selecting the records in our programs.

That’s all we need to fill out so click the Save button and then press the Back key.

If all goes well we can activate our table and move on to entering records. Click the little match stick icon to activate your table and check the status bar at the bottom to ensure everything works successfully.

This concludes the lesson on creating database tables.