ABAP

This is a repost of an article originally posted to the SAP Community Network. Some Background Information A core capability of the Clinical System i.s.h.med is to manage clinical documents. Regardless of the representation and structure of the contents, clinical documents share a common set of administrative data, including crucial reference data: which patient, case, movement or service does this document belong to? One has to specify the document reference level when creating the so-called document category, and the system then ensures that a document that has to be assigned to a case can’t be created unless a case number is specified. During normal development and maintenance, most administrators tend to think of these reference levels as transitive: A case always specifies a distinct patient, a movement always uniquely identifies a case and so on. Unfortunately, that is not entirely true. It is possible to enter and process services that are assigned to a patient, but have not (yet) been assigned to a case. This might happen for example when planning services for a patient that will be readmitted in the future: The service is assigned to the patient, but nothing else. Normally, the user should only create documents and other clinical data after the admission has taken place and the case is created, but sometimes, things get mixed up. This lead to multiple documents that were created with reference to a patient and a service, but no case or movement reference, which in turn caused all kinds of subsequent problems. ...

This is a repost of an article originally posted to the SAP Community Network. Trigger Warning: This blog will probably annoy a number of people. It’s been lurking in the back of my mind for some time now, originally inspired by Ralf Wenzel’s article Hungarian beginner’s course - a polemic scripture against Hungarian Notation. Among others, I wouldn’t be too surprised to receive critical comments from Matthew Billingham in particular - but then again, maybe not. As Tolkien has put it a long time ago, “So many strange things have chanced that to learn the praise of a fair lady under the loving strokes of a Dwarf’s axe will seem no great wonder.” I figured I might as well give it a try, even though it might spoily my birthday festivities. ...

This is a repost of an article originally posted to the SAP Community Network. This is the second part of my answer to Christian Drumm’s question What System Landscapes Setup to use for Add On Development? - and probably more of an answer to the original question than the first part. At the moment, many authors choose to place obscure references to Trifluoroacetic acid (or TFA for short) in their blogs, but since this post will be about rather fundamental aspects, I’d like to choose a different setting. ...

This is a repost of an article originally posted to the SAP Community Network, extended by a proposal I made later in the discussion. Introduction In the last years, ABAP development has become a lot easier. The individual developer’s perspective has improved considerably through advanced tooling (ADT!), better online documentation and community support. When I started ABAP development around 2001, you still needed a dedicated machine with quite a price tag only to run the development system of our landscape at a decent speed. Today, that’s easily accomplished using a virtual machine, even on cheap off-the-shelf hardware (which is obviously not recommended for a production system, but hey – what do you think the average Hudson CI server in a small development shop runs on?). With pre-packaged demo systems, a complete ABAP development environment is in reach for most people – I just installed a system a within a few hours (including downloading 15 GB of installation files, setting up the VirtualBox server and the underlying OS, while doing other stuff alongside). If you don’t want to run the system on your own hardware, you can get a CAL account and run the systems in the cloud as well. ...

This is a repost of an article originally posted to the SAP Community Network. There are various ways to handle XML data in ABAP, all of them more or less well-documented. If you need a downwards-compatible event-based parsing approach, for example, you might want to use the iXML library with its built-in SAX-style parser. (Note that iXML still constructs the entire document, so it’s more like a DOM parser with a SAX event output attached to it. If you’re looking for a strictly serial processing facility, check out the relatively new sXML library instead.) ...