Get to know and how to use – Whitelisted Released ABAP Artifacts for Configuration Experts in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

In this short blog post you will get to know the latest feature released in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1905 called – ‘Released ABAP Artifacts’, like – Classes, Interfaces, and Data Structures

Blog Applicability

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release   - 1905

Target Audience

Key Users, Developers of SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Introduction

What can you expect from this blog?

In this blog, I will guide you on how to use the whitelisted ABAP development artifacts in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. These whitelisted artifacts can be used to further extend and enhance SAP S/4HANA Cloud applications and solutions. The main context of this blog is to reuse the released whitelisted artifacts when implementing enhancements in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Skills Required

You should have the knowledge of Extensibility Framework in SAP S/4HANA with ABAP development background and should be well versed with SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.4 for Suite, version for SAP HANA.

Note – As of now, this tool is applicable for SAP S/4HANA Cloud only.

App in focus

How do I get this app?

To your user in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, you should have the following roles and catalog assigned.

Business Catalog	SAP_CA_BC_REL_ABAP_ART_PC	Foundation – Released ABAP Artifact Explorer App
Business Roles	SAP_BR_BPC_EXPERT	Configuration Expert – Business Process Configuration

Let’s get started

This is the first blog of the three-part series where we will get to know and how to use whitelisted ABAP artifacts – Classes, Interfaces, and Data Structures. We will see their use in the following blogs –

1. Get to know and how to use whitelisted released ABAP artifact – Classes

2. Get to know and how to use whitelisted released ABAP artifact – Interfaces (upcoming blog)

3. Get to know and how to use whitelisted released ABAP artifact – Data Structures (upcoming blog)

Let’s go ahead and know more about this app and our first use case – Using the ABAP artifact – Classes when implementing enhancements in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. With the help of this app, the key users can see details of the following whitelisted ABAP development artifacts –

◈ Classes

◈ Interfaces

◈ Data Structures

[Fig 2 – Snapshot of the Released ABAP Artifacts app]

We can do following with this tool –

◈ Browse through all the available whitelisted artifacts such as classes, interfaces, and data structures

◈ It also displays the relevant documentation that describes its functionality, relationships to other artifacts, example and further information

Setting up the premise

The main premise of all 3 of our use cases would be to see how we can reuse these released whitelisted artifacts in enhancement implementations instead of writing the new code ourselves.

Reusing the whitelisted artifact – Classes

Preparatory steps- 

Scenario – We will take the example of the app – Manage Purchase Order. In our scenario, we will assume that we have a custom field of type – Date. We would use the reusable ABAP artifact and default it with the system date whenever a user creates a new Purchase Order. We will see how we can reuse the available API. Please note that adding a custom field is not part of this blog.

I start with the assumption that you would have already gone through the blog to learn how to add a custom field. As you can see from the below screenshot, I have added a new custom field – ‘Demo Date Field’ in the app.

[Fig 3 – Snapshot of the app before custom field]

[Fig 4 – Snapshot of the app after adding a custom field of type – Date]

As you can see, as of now a user can choose the date. But for this blog, we will now see how we can use the reusable artifact to default the date whenever the user creates a new Purchase Order.

Let’s go to our app – Released ABAP artifact and find an API class that provides us this functionality.

From the list, you can see there are a lot of released classes available that we can use for different functionalities. For this blog, we are interested in the class – CL_ABAP_CONTEXT_INFO.

[Fig 5 – Using the released ABAP artifact]

So, what do we get from this Artifact? Click on the arrow on the right of this item to know more details of this class. As you can see the description says this artifact provides – Reuse functions for user and system information.

[Fig 6 – List of methods available in this artifact]

For our scenario, we need the method – GET_SYSTEM_DATE. Choose this method to see its signature. As you can see it has a Returning parameter – RV_DATE that would return us the system date

[Fig 7 – Signature of the method]

Next, we will use this artifact in our enhancement implementation. We will first do the enhancement implementation using ‘Custom Fields and Logic App’. For this blog, I assume you already know how to create enhancement implementation.

To use this released ABAP artifact, I will go to the ABAP Web editor after creating the enhancement implementation of the Business Context – “Procurement: Purchasing Document” and BADI – “Modification of Purchase Order Header”. See the example below.

[Fig 8 – Implementing the BADI to handle the logic for date field]

In the ABAP web editor, default the custom date field that we added in the header of the Purchase Order Fiori app by using following lines of code. Now publish your enhancement.

* Declaring the local object of the released ABAP artifact class

Data oref TYPE REF TO CL_ABAP_CONTEXT_INFO.

* Instatiating the object

oref = new #( ).

* Note - Here, get_system_date( ) is the method of the class CL_ABAP-CONTEXT_INFO that we saw in the app - Released ABAP artifact

* Passing the system date in our custom field that was added at the header level of the PO

purchaseorderchange-yy1_demodatefield_pdh = oref->get_system_date( ).

[Fig 9 – Defaulting the custom date field]

Let’s test our implementation now –

Now we will create a new purchase order.

Expected result – The system date should default in our custom date field after the user saves the purchase order. In this scenario, I am using copy of an existing PO.

Now open the app – Manage Purchase Order and create a new Purchase Order or you can also copy an existing PO to create a new PO to save time when testing. Refer to figure 4 above in which we saw how our custom field looked like before we implemented the enhancement and used the released ABAP artifact.

[Fig 10 – Before saving the new PO]

[Fig 11 – After saving the new PO]