ABAP in S4 HANA

ABAP in SAP S/4HANA: Evolution and Best Practices

SAP S/4HANA represents the next generation of business software from SAP, fundamentally altering the landscape of enterprise resource planning (ERP). With this transformation comes a significant shift in the role and techniques for ABAP, the robust programming language that has long been the backbone of SAP systems.

Let’s explore this evolution and understand best practices for maximizing ABAP development in the S/4HANA era.

The S/4HANA Impact

• HANA-Optimized: The in-memory HANA database drives S/4HANA’s core, allowing for unprecedented performance and real-time analytics. ABAP code must be optimized to leverage HANA’s power fully. This frequently means rethinking how you work with data.
• Core Data Services (CDS): CDS views serve as powerful data modeling tools. They streamline the definition of data structures and relationships that ABAP code can consume, simplifying many development tasks.
• SAP Fiori: S/4HANA promotes Fiori as its modern, user-friendly interface. ABAP plays a role in building Fiori applications and ensuring smooth integration with backend logic.
• ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP): RAP empowers you to create OData services as a foundation for modern, flexible, and web-based frontends while drawing upon your ABAP knowledge.

Key Considerations for the ABAP Developer

1. Embrace CDS: Start to see CDS as your primary tool for data modeling and retrieval. Learn its syntax, and use it extensively to reduce custom SQL and create reusable data definitions.
2. HANA is King:  Always consider how to leverage HANA’s capabilities when writing ABAP code. Techniques like code-pushdown (executing logic within the database) become critical for performance.
3. Get RESTful: Understand RAP principles and explore how to expose business logic as OData services. This opens up your SAP system to a wider world of integration with modern applications.
4. Fiori-Friendly Development: If you’re involved in UI development, learn about Fiori elements and the technologies to create the user experience expected in an S/4HANA world.
5. Clean Core Principle: S/4HANA calls for the “clean core” concept, promoting custom developments as extensions where possible rather than modification to SAP standard code. This improves upgrade-stability.

Example: Rethinking a Development Scenario

In older SAP systems, you might have created an extensive custom table and ABAP code to manage sales orders. In S/4HANA, you might achieve a more elegant solution using:

• A CDS view to model the structure of your sales order data
• Native HANA optimizations within your CDS view
• An OData service built with RAP to expose the data
• A Fiori application for the user interface

It’s Not Goodbye, It’s Evolution

The importance of ABAP endures in S/4HANA. Your foundational skills remain incredibly valuable. However, the best ABAP developers in the S/4HANA era adapt and learn these new paradigms, leveraging the power of CDS, HANA, Fiori, and RAP alongside their core ABAP knowledge.