This is a guest article is by Plamen Velkov, who is taking my Beginners Guide To SAP ABAP programming course. This is part 2 of his course review / journey.
Take it away Plamen…
Following on from my last article where I discussed the first module of the SAP ABAP Beginners Course, I have now want to cover the module 2 – Data Dictionary and module 3 – Introducing the ABAP Editor.
Data Dictionary
ABAP’s Data Dictionary was also a strange term to me. Moreover the notation that it’s one of the important tools in the ABAP workbench seemed weird. Because I was used to MySQL’s command line, I never thought it would be so much easier to create and maintain a table through such an interface.
In the beginning, when I started reading about ABAP, I thought that the maintenance of the tables would be something like SQL – based on queries and as I said above, since I was used to typing queries by hand in the MySQL command line (which is very annoying) I expected SAP to be the same thing. That’s why I was very surprised to discover the Data Dictionary.
It gives you all the power to maintain your tables without writing a single line of code. The interface is fairly understandable and easy to use when you get used to it. Creating a simple table doesn’t take very long at all and you actually need only a little knowledge to get started. Of course, it could maybe be more complicated if you have complex database table to deal with, but I’m pretty sure the Data Dictionary will help you do it as easy as possible.
As for the course module covering the Data Dictionary – it helped me a lot with my first real ABAP task in my job. I had to modify a program to read some data from a table, and not from data variables inside the code. I was very happy with the fact that I completed half of my task with only one module.
My manager, on the other side, was pleased to know I finished it so quickly and without asking someone to help me.
ABAP Editor
The editor is my favorite part of the Workbench – because it’s where the code is written. There’s not much to say here – it has the regular functions of every other code editor. I was very surprised to see it has auto-completion.
Some people think it’s annoying, but for me – it’s just saving my time. This module starts with a “Hello World” program. It’s a standard part of beginners’ course in any programming language, but I’m sure that as soon as you type the WRITE statement, run the program and see the result, you will feel the minor satisfaction of your first success and get the passion to finish the course ASAP.