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18 Techniques for Locating the Underlying Data of a Screen Field
18 Techniques for
Locating the Underlying
Data of a Screen Field
Dennis Barrett
Dennis Barrett is an
applications consultant with
SAP America who focuses
on Service Management/
Customer Service and the
Service Provider solution.
He has been consulting in
computers for over 15
years, always blending
applications and
programming. He is
a certified ABAP
programmer, and is also the
author of “SAP R/3 ABAP/4
Command Reference.”
Picture this. An Operations Manager wants a special report of her
service orders. She gives you a sketch of what she wants it to look
like (columns, rows, headings, grouping, subtotals, totals, and the
like), and points to fields on the Service Management transaction
screens that have the data she wants you to show in the report.
What do you do? Most likely, you would check to find any
existing reports delivered with the system (or already written for this
client) that provide the information the Operations Manager wants, or
that can be copied and revised to fit her needs. If you don’t find any,
you might then look into the appropriate reporting system — in this
case, the Plant Maintenance Information System (PMIS) — to see if
you can adapt it. In this case, however, you can’t find the report, and
you can’t cobble one together from existing ones. You must write a
report or an ABAP Query to fulfill the requirements.
Now, suppose the Operations Manager asks if you can somehow
add just one more little function to her Create Measurement Docu-
ments transaction: paste the associated sales order number into the
MDoc text field. This scenario requires you to create an enhance-
ment. In both the first and second scenario, you’ll need access to
specific data from the database tables. How do you find that data with
just the screen fields as your guide? We all know the information
associated with a transaction is stored in several (sometimes many)
related tables. So, when you need several fields from a transaction
for a report or an enhancement, you may need to find many of the
transaction’s tables and establish the links among them. Those links
are often not obvious.
(complete bio appears on page 18)
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