New Features in ABAP 7.4
New Features in ABAP 7.4 – Database Access
The technical innovations in SAP are coming in rapid succession. It should
therefore not come as a surprise that even the ABAP language is
undergoing transformations. A host of features have been introduced in the
ABAP 7.40 release, and with the upcoming 7.50 release even more new
constructs can be added to your ABAP tool-kit. While nothing has been
taken away, this is to ensure backward compatibility, the rate of change
continues to accelerate. To get a clear technical understanding of ABAP 7.4, I
recommend you read the following links…
One tool I suggest you do add to your ABAP arsenal, and what this blog
series is based on, is the book ABAP® to the Future by Paul hardy. I believe
Paul has currently released a 2nd edition as well. You can nd the book .here
This blog series, like Paul’s book, will focus on the changes that came with
version 7.4 by breaking the blog up into sections a developer would normally
be interested in, like string processing, or conditional logic…etc. Since you
and I are developers, we tend to spend a good bit of time accessing the
database when developing ABAP programs, so let’s begin this series here….
One of the new features of ABAP 7.4 is the ability to use CASE statements in
Open SQL queries. The code below shows an example of this. In this example
there is a eld in a local structure named ERNAM, and it should be lled with
the literals “NAME1”, “NAME2”, or “NAME3” respectively, depending on the
contents of the database eld AUART (DocType).