What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 1 by admin on April 12th, 2013

Anthony Cecchini is the President of Information Technology Partners (ITP), an SAP consulting company headquartered in Pennsylvania. ITP offers comprehensive planning, resource allocation, implementation, upgrade, and training assistance to companies. Anthony has over 17 years of experience in SAP R/3 business process analysis and SAP systems integration. His areas of expertise include SAP NetWeaver integration; ALE development; RFC, BAPI, IDoc, Dialog, and Web Dynpro development; and customized Workflow development. You can reach him at ajcecchini@itpsap.com.

SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP provides highly valuable innovations with SAP NW 7.02 and 7.03, they cover a wide range from language and tool enhancements to UI technologies and services, but don’t be concerned you can still rely on your existing ABAP skills and easily extend to emerging technologies like In-Memory, Cloud and Mobile.

Lets take a look at each release and I will try and distill what it’s FOCUS is for us, the developers..

SAP NW ABAP AS 7.02 – Focus on ABAP Language, tools, UI developer productivity

- New language features for more efficient business programming (2nd keys for internal tables etc.) - Higher developer productivity (code-completion, layer-aware debugging, debugger scripting etc.) - Enable harmonization and extensibility with Floorplan Manager

SAP NW ABAP AS 7.03 - Focus on end user experience and development services

- Enjoyable user experience with SAP NetWeaver Business Client 3.5 and side panel - Easy configuration & custom development with Floorplan Manager using WebDynpro ABAP - BRFplus innovations (Business Rules Framework)

Future Direction - Focus on In-Memory, Cloud, Mobile and developer productivity

- Leverage potential of In-Memory (push code to data, HANA, etc.) - Higher developer productivity and open standards with ABAP in Eclipse - Strengthen Cloud infrastructure

Lets dig a little deeper in each release and see what innovations SAP has provided us in the ABAP Language and Tools area.

ABAP 7.02 – Custom Development Enhancements

ABAP language improvements

- Secondary keys for internal tables - Resumable exceptions - Data types for exact calculations of large numbers

Developer Productivity features

- Comprehensive string processing - Efficient and resource optimizing memory usage - Complete code completion, use expressions as operands and more

Testing, Debugging, Runtime Analysis and Memory Inspection of multi-layered web-based applications

- Coverage results integrated with ABAP Unit results, ABAP Unit Browser in SE80, more detailed coverage results - Debugger Scripting, Layer-aware Debugging, External Debugging - Memory Analysis of Web Dynpro for ABAP applications - New ABAP Runtime Analysis SAT (successor of SE30)

Intelligent Code Completion

Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space to access the information you need right at your fingertips. Intelligent code completion proposes what to type in and inserts the text proposed: for the entry of all methods, attributes, and interfaces of global and local classes, function modules, and so on.

Secondary keys for internal tables

Internal tables just got even better! Use secondary keys to improve the performance of your application.

New ABAP Runtime Analysis (SAT)

State-of-the-art debugging

In the next part of this BLOG series on What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03, I will take a look at the Custom Development changes in ABAP 7.03 as well as the new Custom Development Enhancements for UI i.e SAP NetWeaver Business Client.

What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 2 by admin on May 5th, 2013

Anthony Cecchini is the President of Information Technology Partners (ITP), an SAP consulting company headquartered in Pennsylvania. ITP offers comprehensive planning, resource allocation, implementation, upgrade, and training assistance to companies. Anthony has over 17 years of experience in SAP R/3 business process analysis and SAP systems integration. His areas of expertise include SAP NetWeaver integration; ALE development; RFC, BAPI, IDoc, Dialog, and Web Dynpro development; and customized Workflow development. You can reach him at ajcecchini@itpsap.com.

SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP provides highly valuable innovations with SAP NW 7.02 and 7.03, they cover a wide range from language and tool enhancements to UI technologies and services, but don’t be concerned you can still rely on your existing ABAP skills and easily extend to emerging technologies like In-Memory, Cloud and Mobile.

Lets take a overview look at the key needs and innovations introduced in ABAP 7.03 for custom development.

ABAP 7.03 – Custom Development Enhancements

Lets take a overview look at the key needs and innovations introduced in ABAP 7.03 for UI (User Interface)

ABAP 7.03 – Custom Development Enhancements for UI

SAP NetWeaver Business Client 3.5 (NWBC)

New Side Panel for enriching applications without ABAP modifications

The SAP NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) is a rich desktop client that offers a unified environment for and a single point of entry to SAP applications. It provides a solution for hosting classical dynpros (SAP GUI UIs), Web Dynpro applications, BSP pages, portal pages, and other content. You can use the SAP NWBC either with or without the portal depending on whether you want to access ABAP back ends directly or not.

The SAP NWBC also supports generic desktop functions, like drag and drop, popup windows, and so on through the utilization of the corresponding APIs. The result is an efficient, modern and attractive client environment ideally suited to the power user.

-Adds instant value to custom specific apps and 500+ SAP GUI apps in SAP Business Suite 2011 -Interoperability between ABAP Dynpro and Web applications running in NWBC Side Panel -Contextual data from Dynpro applications can be accessed by WD ABAP, WDA Page Builder and JavaScript/HTML applications -Enterprise Search enabling -All active Enterprise Search connectors are automatically offered as search providers -Central administration

The side panel in more detail

Side Panel used for Notes / Attachments

Side Panel used for Master Data Detail Information

Side Panel used for BI Analytical Content

For more information about NetWeaver ABAP AS Business Client, see SAP Note 900000.

For release restrictions, see SAP Note 1620514 (NWBC for Desktop) and SAP Note 1620576 (NWBC for HTML).

For the latest changes and updates to the documentation for SAP NetWeaver Business Client 3.5, see SAP Note 1757400.

To view the first blog in this series please click What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 1

In the next part of this BLOG series on What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03, I will take a look at the Floor Plan Manger for Web Dynpro , The “Business Rule Framework Plus” and SAP Stream work.

What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 3 by admin on June 17th, 2013

Anthony Cecchini is the President of Information Technology Partners (ITP), an SAP consulting company headquartered in Pennsylvania. ITP offers comprehensive planning, resource allocation, implementation, upgrade, and training assistance to companies. Anthony has over 17 years of experience in SAP R/3 business process analysis and SAP systems integration. His areas of expertise include SAP NetWeaver integration; ALE development; RFC, BAPI, IDoc, Dialog, and Web Dynpro development; and customized Workflow development. You can reach him at ajcecchini@itpsap.com.

SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP provides highly valuable innovations with SAP NW 7.02 and 7.03, they cover a wide range from language and tool enhancements to UI technologies and services, but don’t be concerned you can still rely on your existing ABAP skills and easily extend to emerging technologies like In-Memory, Cloud and Mobile.

As promised this month we’ll take a look at Floor Plan Manger for Web Dynpro , The “Business Rule Framework Plus” and SAP Stream work.

Floorplan Manager for Web Dynpro ABAP Lest start with some background

Floorplan Manager is a framework that you can use to create and configure Web Dynpro applications in Web Dynpro ABAP. You can use the Floorplan Manager configuration editor to combine application-specific views of one or more business applications to a new Floorplan Manager application. Floorplan Manager gives you the following advantages:

- The design of all cross-application components of a user interface is defined by the Floorplan Manager.

- The design follows the SAP user interface design guidelines.

- Users of such applications benefit from a high level of recognition, which enables them to quickly and easily familiarize themselves with new applications.

- The integration of design templates such as floorplans and generic user interface building blocks into Floorplan Manager accelerates the creation of user interfaces and also ensures that the user interfaces behave the same way in all applications.

- Time-consuming user interface programming is greatly reduced for application programming.

- Simple applications are adjusted by configuring the underlying Web Dynpro components and not by additional programming.

- Adjustments that you make to the user interfaces of applications using the Floorplan Manager configuration editor are modification-free changes.

- Floorplan Manager uses the Web Dynpro adjustment concept.

So what’s new in ABAP AS 7.03 to enhance both the end user and developer productivity?

Web Dynpro ABAP Page Builder The Web Dynpro ABAP Page Builder, is a new runtime authoring tool, used to easily build Web Dynpro pages using CHIPs (Collaborative Human Interface Parts). Typically, you use the Page Builder to design home pages that enable users to access their main tasks and that provide the option to adapt the page, for instance by adding CHIPs to it in which their favorite Web pages are embedded.

Lest look at an example below….

So what’s new in ABAP AS 7.03 to enhance both the end user and developer productivity?

Business Rule Framework plus (BRFplus) Again, lets get some background first…..

Business Rule Framework plus (BRFplus) provides a comprehensive application programming interface (API) and user interface (UI) for defining and processing business rules. It allows you to model rules in an intuitive way and to reuse these rules in different applications.The interface between a business rule modeled with BRFplus and an application using that rule is provided by a BRFplus function. The function serves as a container for the entire business logic of a rule, no matter how complex it may be. Rules are implemented as expressions which are assigned to a function. The rule input is known as context and the rule output is called result. Context and result consist of data objects of one of the following types: element, structure, and table

Rules Authoring with BRFplus

New in BRFplus (ABAP AS NetWeaver 7.0 EhP 3)

SAP® StreamWork™ SAP StreamWork is a collaborative decision-making environment hosted on the web. This product lets people make decisions by discussing an issue online, sharing information, and taking advantage of a set of business tools.

With SAP StreamWork, you can provide trusted information, coordinate people, and monitor discussions to make better decisions based on facts. In SAP StreamWork, you use notes, documents, email, and a set of professional decision making tools to help you and participants make business decisions.

What are the benefits?

Below are some KEY scenarios StreamWork can be used ..

You can even use SAP StreamWork in the NWBC (NetWeaver Business Client) Side Panel

To view the first blog in this series please click What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 1

To view the second blog in this series please click What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03 – Part 2