Web Dynpro for ABAP

Web Dynpro for ABAP is a development technology enabling creation of web applications within the SAP system. Web Dynpros have their own development framework. Flow control and display objects including input fields, tables, image placement etc are added using the custom techniques, while all processing and calculation code is written using SAP ABAP. This enables creation of applications faster particularly in case of the floor plan manager framework usage. Another advantage is ABAP developers can easily create web applications without the need to learn any other specific language. Thus, a basic understanding of ABAP and knowledge of how to navigate around the WDP development platform, which is accessed via the standard SAP development workbench transaction SE80, are essential to develop ABAP webdynpro applications.

Basic Concepts

View – critical logical layout element in the Web Dynpro application responsible for the presentation logic and for the browser layout. Gives description of a visible screen area; contains and lays out controls (aka widgets) and defines actions (i.e. relevant input on controls by the user) triggering event handling.

Controller – active part of web dynpro application; handles the data flow between the model and the view in both directions; performs event handling; each component has a component controller; each view has a view controller;

Custom controllers may be added for further structuring.

Model – interface to the back end system; responsible for providing data to the entire application; represents the data in the backend.

Component – Reusable UI program package; contains views, often uses models; Communicates with other components via component interfaces.

Application – Something runnable (from client application, i.e. web browser); Identified by URL; Running an application means starting a component, navigating to an initial view in an initial window.

Windows – Single UI unit representing a component’s user Interface/View Composition needed for embedding purposes.

Context – A controller contains a context which holds the data; the data flow between the contexts is referred to as context mapping.

Benefits

Due to its high demand for creating powerful web based application with minimum coding, SAP Webdynpro ABAP is a hot cake in the market. Additional benefits include:

• Enables developer to maximize design and minimize coding
• Drag and drop options are available with SAP Webdynpro ABAP (WDA) for creating UI.
• Platform independent SAP WDA gives a clear separation between the layout and the business logic.
• Supports multiple Backend Systems and supports web services call from the SAP WDA workbench.
• WDA can also integrate with SAP Interactive Adobe Forms, which are interactive PDF forms.
• Component usage allows achievement of high reusability and maintainability.