Technical Articles
ABAP CDS Views Development Guidelines and Naming Conventions
It always helps to define development guidelines / naming conventions and adhere to them. ABAP CDS View development is not an exception.
Development guidelines / Naming Conventions are not something set in stone. They need to make sense and meant to help rather than complicate life. So if you have better ideas, please share in comments.
General Considerations:
- STOB (name after define view) and DDLS (used in CDS wizard creation wizard) MUST be the same. Will save you trouble locating views
- Dimension and measures names for SAP standard fields should be the same as SAP uses. It is absolute MUST for dimensions to make sure that navigations are working;
- Associate dimension to dimension fields to take advantage of attributes, hierarchies, texts and values helps
- Associate ABAP Boolean fields (‘X’ / ‘ ‘) with I_Indicator SAP standard dimension CDS view to provide user friendly texts like Yes / No
- Associate User ID field with Rv_P_User with SAP standard dimension CDS view to provide user friendly full name instead of user id
- Format % values accordingly instead just decimal fraction of 1. See my blog for more information
- Suppress row and/or columns with all zeros using Analytics.settings.zeroValues.handling annotation
- If needed, cast custom fields to SAP data elements to get the right descriptions and formatting
- Assign quantity and amount unit of measures to ensure correct aggregation and presentation;
- If you extend standard CDS view with custom fields then name custom fields starting with Z to avoid future naming collisions with SAP standard fields
- Use UNION ALL instead of UNION where applicable to improve performance
- If CDS View has parameters, then provide value help as explained. See Maksim Alyapyshev’s blog for more information.
General Naming Convention:
- Use CamelCase naming for CDS View fields (not underscores);
- CDS STOB views name should start with prefix, for example, ZC_ followed by CamelCase name (not underscores). CDS DDLS is capitalized by the system;
- CDS View parameter names should be prefixed with P_ followed by by CamelCase name (not underscores).
- Association names should start with _ followed by view without prefix, for example, _Material for I_Material.
View Specific Naming Conventions:
| View Type | Naming Convention | Comments |
| Dimension | ZI_<DimensionName> | |
| Dimension Extension | ZX_<DimensionName> | |
| Value Help | ZX_<DimensionName>VH | |
| Text | ZI_<DimensionName>TEXT | |
| Hierarchy | ZI_< DimensionName >HIER | Add sequence number at the end if need more than one |
| Table Function | ZI_<CubeName>FUNC | Add sequence number at the end if need more than one |
| Cube | ZI_<CubeName>CUBE | |
| Query | ZI_<CubeName>QUERY | Add sequence number at the end if need more than one |
| Access Control | ZI_<CubeName>CUBE | |
| Transactional | ZI_<BusinessObjectName>TP |
I always struggle with the need for a naming convention. If you do a search, you'll see what CDS objects are available and the type with them.
You are right a lot of them are just a general type. Clicking into them might be a pain. I do see some benefit to using your naming convention at that time.. I don't know, we used to have naming conventions something like this - ZOTC_. But we didn't need that once we really started using packages.
So perhaps at this point the naming convention is good. Then later if we find out we don't use them then get rid of it. Only time will tell.
How about CDS views used in transactional application development. Business Object view and Consumption views? Any naming recommnedation for there?
Hi Vineet,
updated. Thank you for contribution.
Regards, Uladzislau
Nice one Uladzislau Pralat !!!
, but missing some information like consumption view naming convention and
now SAP ABAP Restful programming model help has given more info on that, which you can add in that table and link as well
https://help.sap.com/viewer/923180ddb98240829d935862025004d6/Cloud/en-US/8b8f9d8f3cb948b2841d6045a255e503.html
Thanks,
Mahesh
Hi Mahesh,
thank you for your contribution.
Regards, Uladzislau
hi Uladzislau Pralat ,
can you please provide naming conventions for below things
Information views
composite views
consumption views
CDS Parameters naming
associations naming
view on view
extension view.
Hi Bala,
thank you for your contribution.
Regards, Uladzislau
Uladzislau, was that a typo or deliberate? Your clarification will be much appreciated:
Shouldn't it have a suffix of ACCESS or AUTH? Because Access Control can be applied to different view types, not only CUBEs.
Volodymyr, you are right that Access Control apply to different view types. In my case it is a specific scenario. Regarding suffix I do not agree. If you check SAP standard DDLS their corresponding DCLS have identical names, so it is is better to follow SAP naming convention without any suffixes
Hi Uladzislau,
Is there a technical reason for the following recommendation or is it for aesthetic reasons only?
I have looked and cannot find this recommendation in the SAP best practice guide. So I am curious to know if using CamelCase can avoid a particular technical issue?
Thanks
Hi Che,
just to be consistent with SAP standard CDS view.
Regards, Uladzislau