SAP's three-tiered architecture is the backbone of an R/3 infrastructure. It's what makes an R/3 system flexible, reliable, and open, all at the same time. It's also what makes locating underlying data, at times, so inherently difficult. For example, when you need several fields from a transaction for a report or an enhancement, you will probably need to find many of the transaction's tables and establish the links among them. Those links are often not obvious. This article shares 18 techniques the author has gathered and developed over time to locate such data, along with advice on which techniques to try first, and which to use only as a last resort.
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’s a certified ABAP programmer and often facilitates communications between business process owners and programmers. Dennis is the author of “SAP R/3 ABAP/4 Command Reference,” published by Que/MacMillan, and wrote “Customer Service ABAP Tables for Programmers,” published this spring in the PM/CS e-Newsletter, which is sent to all SAP consultants in Plant Maintenance and Customer Service. Dennis maintains a personal Web site at www.mindspring.com~dennis.barrett, which includes copies of the PM/CS articles as well as white papers and other items of interest to ABAP programmers and CS consultants.
You may contact the author at dennis.barrett@sap.com.
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