ABAP Domain and Data Types Understanding - tsql

so my company wants me to learn ABAP for SAP and I have started on the road to learn this. My background is mainly VB.net and sqlserver with T-SQL but also have experience in c#.
With ABAP though I am needing some clarification or confirmation on the understanding of Data Types and Domain. If anyone can help.
My understanding currently is we have a table, in the table we have fields and the fields have data types and lengths if needed. Example: We have a table Customer, I could have a customerNumber field with the data type of char(10). To me this mean in the table customer we have a field called CustomerNumber that will have 10 characters.
However with ABAP we have Domains, Data elements then the field, does this mean we have a field named whatever we want. As the field could mean anything we assign a data element which has the descriptions of the sort of data stored within the field. However to store the format and data type we need to assign the Domain to the Data element.
For example I call a field ZCUSNO, currently this means nothing however if I assign the ZCTNMR (with description of customer number) Data element this tells us that the field ZCUSNO is ZCTNMR so ZCUSNO is a customer number field.
Now within the data elements we would have a domain and for our example ZCTNMR data element (the customer number) we could assign ZCTDOM as the domain which would be what I recognise as the data types so Char 20, Char 100 or integer field etc.
Is my understanding correct on this? and could someone give me a clear indication of what the difference between a Domain > Data Element is against what I would know as data types in sqlserver.
Thanks

I don't know if it's 100% correct, but that's is the way I use, like you say.
You can reuse the Domain, If you don't plan to reuse you can use direct the Data Element and refer this to a built-in-type.
Data Element is to define semantic of the field, like label, translation, etc
Domain is to define techinical info of the field, like Type, conversions, predefined Values,e tc
E.G.
Domain:
DOM_VALUE you define it's 10 position and 2 Decimals
Data Element:
UNIT_VAL you refer it to DOM_VALUE and define label as "Unit Value"
TOTAL_VAL you refer it to DOM_VALUE and define label as "Total Value"

Your understanding is pretty correct and not much can be added here.
You should clearly get the main thing.
Domains store technical data (decimal points, length, type, predefined values and so on)
Data elements store semantic data (labels, texts, search help binding, etc.)
Not every table field has data element (they can possess builtin type) but every field has type (either primitive or wrapped in data element).
If you wanna use your field in screens (Dynpros), ALV grids or other reports, then create data elements that will bear business meaning of your field.
If you use this field just for calculations or other utility internal tasks, then don't bother yourself.

As usual table date field (type of variable) uses data element which uses domain.
When you create fields in table and use predefined types instead of data elements you will have some problems in future, when you'll need to see the data on alv_grid.
Actually, you will see that you have some problems even before this (when you will try to make a maintenance view the header will have something like "+" symbol).
And of course we usually try to create 1 domain for 2 and more Data Elements.
In domain you talk about main logic.
In Data Element I always talk about Field label settings (how it'll show in future and some other things)
Final: Actually, the good practice, as I think to create a domain for data element, it may help you in future.
I hope that it helps you. Good luck!

Related

what is the correct terminology for data that has no meaning?

A database organises/structures bits of data into tables, records and fields. The name of each table and field gives semantic meaning to the data they contain. So, for example, a datatable called 'individuals' may well have a field called 'firstName', and as a result we know that the string "john" found in that field on one record in that table is the first name of an individual. As a result, the string "john" has a meaning and as a result could be referred to as a piece of data.
That datatable could be represented on an excel or other spreadsheet with the records as rows and the fields given as column headers at the top of the sheet, so that we know that all the bits of info under the header "firstName" are first names.
Now, imagine that same sheet, but without the field names in the first row. We have a structured list of values, organised into rows and columns. We can see that in one column there are a series of values "john", "jim", "sue", etc. We might guess that they are first names but we don't KNOW that they are. My question is: what is the correct terminology for this kind of data which has no ostensible meaning.
In other fields of human endeavour one might be faced with an undifferentiated mass of meaningless or unimportant static or "noise", and with skill identify some meaningful intelligence or "signal". I am looking for the equivalent data management term for that undifferentiated mass containing both signal and noise.
Essentially, I am looking for a synonym for data, but a name that implies "non-information" in that the items are essentially collection of strings, numbers, whatever that have no obvious meaning (...yet!). Words such as values, info, content all seem to convey too great a sense of importance or meaning, whereas dross, rubbish, noise are also too pejorative. Any suggestions?

adding up specific mergefield values in word

I have a table in a word document that has three colums and all fields are mailmerge fields from an external IT system.
There are three columns displaying the fields:
Charge Description
Charge Value (£)
Eiligible? (yes/no)
I am trying to create a field that adds up all eligibale charges so that only charge values that show a "yes" in the eligigble field are included. Does anyone know if this is possible? I have tried creating a formula but can't get it to work. Also, I would assume at some point an if statment is required so that it only includes the eligible charge.
Has anyone done anything similar before and if so, would they mind sharing how it was achieved?
Many thanks
You can do some things with expression fields (created in Word with CTRL-F9). This will look like {} and you can insert the expression. eg {{MERGFIELD charge} + {MERGEFIELD charge2}}. Since however you want to check multiple values and then create an expression, its probably easier to use a macro. The macro would contain your logic, then set the fields in the document accordingly.
Here are two external links since I can't reproduce a useful amount the content here because it's a verbose answer to a potentially deep question:
Expression Fields
Merge fields
I hope that helps.

Sulu CMS: how to search/filter for content of a specific type with specific values for specifc attributes?

Short description of the situation:
We're running a forked version of Sulu 1.5.2, PHP 7.1, Windows server environment, db connection with PostgreSQL
We have a website structure/tree where we have house templates at the top level; each house has one house_rooms and one house_occupants template; each house_rooms template has N house_rooms_room templates, and each house_occupants template has N house_occupants_occupant templates. This represents an actual House that has N Rooms and N Occupants.
Now I'd like to know if there is a way to specifically get, for instance, all the house_occupants_occupant content that follows a certain pattern of attributes (for instance: their gender attribute having value 'female' and their date_of_birth parameter being >= 1990/01/01), without having to load each house, then find its house_occupantspage among the children, and then loop over that template's house_occupants_occupant children and filter the thus begotten content according to their gender and date of birth attributes.
I already found that there is a ContentRepository class that can ::findAll() and ::findByUuids(), but there doesn't seem to be a way to filter on specific attributes (like template type, template attributes, ...). So I took a roundabout way of creating my own "repository" that does direct PDO queries on the phpcr_nodes table in the database, to specifically scan the props attribute for the occurence of a certain template name:
$this->pdo->query("SELECT identifier, props FROM phpcr_nodes WHERE props LIKE '%>house_occupants_occupant<%'");
I can see that the propscontains a string value representing an XML document that somehow translates into the entire template with attribute-value pairs, however it is obscured regarding tag-levels and how certain attributes relate to certain values. So in theory I could use a specific XML parser to turn this into something human-readable, so that for my house_occupants_occupant data I could get something like:
// what I would get after putting the props through a certain XML parser:
$xmlHumanReadableData = [
'<the_uuid_of_occupant_1>' => [
...
'gender' => 'female',
'date_of_birth' => '1992-05-18T00:00:00.000+00:00',
...
],
... //etcetera etcetera
];
When I would have that, I could filter the readable data to ascertain which content I want to keep, add the node-uuid to some $theUuids variable, and then retrieve the actual content using Sulu's ContentRepository::findByUuids($theUuids) method. That would "only" require 2 queries and some PHP array filtering in between, which is a great deal better than looping over all the children content starting from a certain parent and doing this until you've traversed all the parents and all their children... (Certainly, the overhead would increase if you'd want to search for, for instance, all house nodes where at least one of its house_occupants_occupant nodes represents a child less than 10 years old, since you'd need extra queries to "set up" the filterdata used in the final query. But still: a great deal better than looping everything... ;-) )
So my question is sort-of twofold:
What is the Sulu-specific XML parser I can use to turn the XML string value in this props column into something human-readable, with proper attribute-value pairs?
And/or, hopefully: is there a way I can avoid all this nonsense and just use a less low-level way of retrieving content of a specific template type with specific values for specific attributes ?
The ContentRepository you've found is already an abstraction to some of our requirements for pages. Your requirements are already quite specific, so you should write your own query using SQL-2, the query language for PHPCR.
This should enable you to write a query which matches your requirements.

Prioritise which identifier to use

My crystal report pulls data about books, including an identifier (isbn, issn order number etc.), author, and publisher.
The ID field stores multiple ways to identify the book. The report displays any of the identifiers for that record. If one book has two identifiers; issn and order number, the report currently displays one apparently at random.
How can I make it prioritise which type to use based on a preset order? I figured some sort of filter on the field could work, but I haven't figured out how. I can't edit the table, but I can use SQL within the report.
If all the different types of ID are stored in a single field, your best bet is to use a SQL Command inside your report to separate them into multiple virtual fields.
Go to Database Fields / Database Expert, expand the connection you want to use, and pick Add Command. From here you can write a custom SQL statement to grab the information you're currently using, and at the same time separate the ID field into multiple different fields (as far as the report will be concerned, anyway. The table will stay unchanged.)
The trick is to figure out how to write your command to do the separation. We don't know what your data looks like, so you're on your own from here.
Based on the very little information that you have provided and if i was to make a guess.I suggest you make use of the formula field in your report and then use something like this to accomplish your goal.
IF ISNULL{first_priority_field_name} OR {first_priority_field_name} = '' THEN
{second_priority_field_name}
ELSE
{first_priority_field_name}
Use nested IF statement in case there are more than 2 identifier fields.

FileMaker - Getting Data From Another Table with Multiple Field Restrictions

I can't think of a better title, so feel free to make a suggestion once you understand the issue.
I was given a table to work with that I need to call from another table:
Name
Month
Type
Value
For each record in the main table I need to pull one "Value" that corresponds to it. What it is will be determined by all three of the other fields. So for example, if a record in the main table is:
Name:
Google
Date:
3\17\2016
Type:
M
Then I need to pull the value for the record in the other table where the Name is "Google", the month is "3", and the type is "M".
I was able to do this successfully (if slowly) using an ExecuteSQL command in a calculation field, with a ton of nested If statements for the names (I have yet to figure out how to input the record's data directly into the ExecuteSQL statement, it breaks when I try). I would prefer to just grab the data directly. I can't switch over to the other layout because I need to see all of the records at once. I can't do a simple relationship because there isn't a real relationship, it's like there are three foreign keys working in tandem and I only know how to use one to call the data.
Any idea on how to do this more simplistically?
Some ideas I've had but not sure if it will work:
Using a calculation field as a related field to dynamically point to the row by code (concatenate the three relevant fields into a type of code). Not sure if you can connect two tables by a calculation field.
Doing that same thing when calling the data into the table in the first place, adding a code to create a single primary key.
Here are my relationships:
I can't do a simple relationship because there isn't a real
relationship, it's like there are three foreign keys working in tandem
and I only know how to use one to call the data.
Simply define a relationship with three predicates - i.e. three pairs of match fields.