ABAP: Table Type

What is Table Type?

Table types are used to define internal tables. When you create a table type in the ABAP dictionary, you should specify the line type, access type and key.

Internal table used to store table data in working memory (RAM) in ABAP. If you are from Java programming, you can assume it is like a collection.

Suppose you want toget all the students information whose rating is Good (or) Excellent from the table ‘ZSTUDENT_RATING’ and store it in an internal table ‘ZSTUDENT_RATING_INTERNAL’.

You need to set below things while defining table types.

a.   Specify the line type: it is the structure of table type

b.   Access mode

c.   Set the keys (primary key and secondary key) to the table type.

What is line type?

It is any data type from ABAP dictionary, it can be a data element, structure, table type (or) type of a database table.

How to define line type?

You can define line type using existing built in types (CHAR, INT4, DEC etc.,), ABAP Dictionary types (Data elements, structures, table types, database tables, views), reference types (Using class or interface).

What is Access mode?

It specifies how the data is accessed and managed in internal table while performing CRUD operations. It can be Standard table (Data arranged sequentially, search is not efficient, since it uses linear search), Hashed table (Data arranged using hash function, it do not support indexing), Index table, sorted table (Data arranged using key, search is efficient since it uses binary search) etc.,

I am going to show you, how to create table type ‘ZSTUDENT_TT’, to hold student information using the structure 'ZSTUDENT_STR' that I created in my previous post.

Creating table type ‘ZSTUDENT_TT’

Use the transaction ‘SE11’ to open ABAP Dictionary.

Populate Data type field with ‘ZSTUDENT_TT’ and click on Create button.

Select the radio button ‘Table type’ and press ok.

It opens below window.

a. Update Short description as ‘Table type to store student information’.

b. Give the Line Type as 'ZSTUDENT_STR'. ‘ZSTUDENT_STR’ is structure I created in my previous post.

Click on ‘Initialization and Access’ tab.

Give ‘Initial Number of Rows’ as 25’, it is used to allocate initial memory for an internal table. This memory will increase dynamically based on number of records.

Select the Access mode as ‘Standard Table’.

Click on the save button and activate the table type.

You can create below table types using the corresponding structures we created in my previous post.

Table Type	Structure
ZPARENT_TT	ZPARENT_STR
ZTEACHING_FACULTY_TT	ZTEACHING_FACULTY_STR
ZNON_TECHING_FACULTY_TT	ZNON_TECHING_FACULTY_STR
ZFACULTY_STUDENT_TT	ZFACULTY_STUDENT_STR
ZSTUDENT_PARENT_TT	ZSTUDENT_PARENT_STR
ZFACULTY_RATING_TT	ZFACULTY_RATING_STR
ZSTUDENT_RATING_TT	ZSTUDENT_RATING_STR

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