ABAP_to_the_Future

15
ABAP Programming for SAP HANA
create external views in SAP HANA an d how to enable the ABAP system to be
able to access such a view. Section 15.3.2 talks about how to call stored procedures
that have been created in SAP HANA from ABAP.
The main drawback to the bottom-up approach is that you have to work in two
unrelated development environments an d manually keep the changes between
the two systems synchronized. Therefore, Section 15.3.3 outlines the fairly convoluted
transport mechanism you need when following such an approach.
Note
Because bottom-up development is no longer the recommended development
approach from SAP, this section provides only an overview of the general process.
15.3.1 Building and Calling External Views
There are two halves to creating an external view: defining the view in SAP HANA
and making such a view visible inside the ABAP system.
An external view is “external” in that the definition is controlled outside of the
ABAP system. Therefore, the first thing yo u need do is to create a view within
SAP HANA, which means opening a deve lopment environment such as SAP
HANA Studio. Inside here, you can build up a graphical representation of the
view you want to create, dragging and dropping the database tables you’re interested
in and linking the columns for the join.
The actual discussion of how to create SAP HANA views is outside the scope of an
ABAP book, so this isn’t discussed here. Instead, assume that your view has been
created—and now you’re ready for the ABAP side of things. In ABAP in Eclipse,
you can right-click the Dictionary node of one of your packages and follow the
path New 폷 Dictionary View. The pop-up box shown in Figure 15.8 appears.
You can see a radio button called External View at the bottom (grayed out in systems
without SAP HANA) and a box to enter the name of an SAP HANA view (or
an option to browse for the one you want). When you click Finish, a DDIC view
is generated, which can be seen in SE11. The only difference between this sort of
view and a traditional SE11 DDIC view is that this will have the words External
View at the top (as opposed to Projection View or Maintenance View or any of
the other types of view you’re used to).
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