ABAP for SAP HANA News for SAP NW 7.5

SAP NetWeaver 7.5 is generally available to the public since October 20th, 2015 and what can be said is that ABAP (still) rocks!

Read this overview about the ABAP stack delivery: SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP 7.5 – One ABAP Platform for SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition.

The current page will give you a compact overview about what’s new in the ABAP for SAP HANA world with AS ABAP 7.5.

ABAP Development for SAP HANA

The integration journey of ABAP and SAP HANA (for combining the best of both worlds) started in 2012 with the early enablement with AS ABAP 7.x for side-by-side scenarios, with SAP HANA as sidecar. The next and major milestone of this journey was reaching the full market readiness with AS ABAP 7.4, which is the first AS ABAP release heavily optimized for SAP HANA, thus allowing an easy leveraging of SAP HANA’s power in ABAP-based applications. It is the first go-to-release for ABAP for SAP HANA.

With AS ABAP 7.5, another major milestone has been reached by providing the foundation of the next SAP Enhancement Package for SAP Business Suite 7 and SAP S/4HANA, the next generation business suite, on-premise edition!

The graphic below shows the stepwise integration journey of ABAP and SAP HANA till today.

SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.5 is the new go-to-release for all ABAP for SAP HANA developments.

In fact, SAP HANA was one of the key drivers of the development activities in this release. The ABAP-managed code pushdown support has now reached the next level with the delivery of new powerful features in areas such as Open SQL, ABAP Core Data Services (CDS) and ABAP managed Database procedures (AMDP).

The graphic below provides an overview of the different code pushdown programming techniques delivered as of ABAP 7.4, and enhanced with ABAP 7.5.

ABAP Core Data Services (CDS)

One of the big development areas in ABAP 7.5 was to provide one harmonized data model for all consumers with ABAP CDS – The next generation data definition and access for database-centric applications.

• CDS view with input parameters are now supported on all databases; meaning fallback no longer required.

ABAP managed Database Procedures (AMDP)

ABAP managed SAP HANA procedures offer the possibility to fully access SAP HANA’s power (i.e. high performance for complex computations and advanced native libraries and engines such as predictive analysis, Text mining and geospatial).

With ABAP 7.5, the class-based AMDP framework has been enhanced and now supports ABAP managed database functions (AMDP Functions) for providing the implementation of CDS table functions. An AMDP Function provides the possibility to developers to implement, manage and run an SQLScript-based HANA function with a tabular return value from the ABAP infrastructure.

In addition, the exception handling has been improved and a new, autonomous AMDP debugger – fully integrated in the ABAP infrastructure – for AMDP procedures is now provided within ABAP in Eclipse. This means, that when debugging an AMDP procedure, the creation of a debug script in SAP HANA is no longer needed.

Enhanced Open SQL

Starting with ABAP 7.4 SP02, Open SQL offers a broader coverage of the SQL Standard. To achieve this, a new syntax – with comma separated SELECT list and escaping of host variables with @ –  was required. But of course the old one is still supported as long as no new feature is used.

The enhancement of Open SQL is still ongoing and several new advanced features have been delivered with ABAP 7.5. Support of new SQL functions, ABAP and SQL expressions Enhanced syntax such as FROM before the field list for allowing code completion of field names Dynamic ON condition Support of UNION / UNION ALL Support of sub-queries as data source of INSERT Usage of CDS associations via path expressions Access to global temporary tables used for storing intermediate results for subsequent database calls Consumption of declarative authorizations (CDS roles)

SAP List Viewer with Integrated Data Access (aka ALV on HANA)

The reuse ALV component optimized for SAP HANA has been further enhanced in ABAP 7.5.

The major new capabilities are: Support of the new built-in data type INT8 provided for supporting very large data set Export of data into Excel (CSV format)  now supported   These features are delivered in addition to various other functions delivered since ABAP 7.4 SPS08, like Unified consumption API for all databases (aka DB capability service) Application-specific authority provider Extended CDS support thru a dedicated factory method Additional navigation possibilities Access to ALV variants in toolbar

• Diverse usability improvements like cell merging of sorted columns and empty table text
• SAP HANA-specific features like default sorting with locale and binary search electable.

ABAP Tools

ABAP Development Tools in Eclipse

ADT is the only development environment that fully supports ABAP for SAP HANA. ADT 2.51 offers together with AS ABAP 7.5 new cool features that further increase the developer efficiency. Just to name a few:

New, autonomous AMDP debugger Enhanced CDS editing support Definition of ON conditions of JOINs using a wizard CDS graphical editor Dependency Analyzer for analyzing dependencies in CDS entities Source-based editor for dictionary structure Form-based editor for data elements Several refactoring aids SQL Monitor View to analyze the performance of a business process

Quality Assurance Tools

ABAP 7.5 keeps up with advanced and powerful test and analysis tools such as

• ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC) / Code Inspector (SCI)
• Runtime Check Monitor (SRTCM)
• SQL Monitor (SQLM or SQL Monitor View in ADT)

These tools offer the basis for a smooth migration of ABAP custom code to SAP HANA (Details can be found in SAP Note 1912445 – SMP login required).

With ABAP 7.5 , the ABAP Test Cockpit offers additional functions for remote Code Vulnerability Analysis (CVA), i.e. for the execution of remote security checks in AS ABAP 7.0 and lower releases.

For those of you not yet familiar with the ABAP for SAP HANA programming, please check the available Get Started materials (Tutorials, Videos, …).

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