Anthony Cecchini is the President of Information Technology Partners (ITP), an SAP consulting company headquartered in Pennsylvania, with offices in Vienna, VA. ITP offers comprehensive planning, resource allocation, implementation, upgrade, and training assistance to companies. Anthony has over 20 years of experience in SAP business process analysis and SAP systems integration. His areas of expertise include SAP NetWeaver integration; ALE development; RFC, BAPI, IDoc, Dialog, and Web Dynpro development; and customized Workflow development. You can reach him at ajcecchini@itpsap.com.
INTERACTING WITH THE HOST OS USING ABAP
SAP does such a good job of abstracting its surrounding environment that we rarely take the features of its host operating system into account. The reality is that ABAP isn’t particularly good at solving certain problems. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with convoluted solutions, it’s best to solve these problems with the right tool. And sometimes, that tool is sitting on the operating system just waiting to be used.
For instance, at one of our current clients, I was working on their EDW team and needed to archive a file from a “process” directory to an “archive” directory after processing. I was surprised to see a relatively seasoned developer was using ABAP logic to achieve this. They were opening a new file in the “archive” directory, writing the contents, and closing the file and finally deleting the file from the “processing” directory. I changed the code to utilize the UNIX MOVE command. It was much less code and leveraged the existing UNIX Command.
In this blog, I want to show you how to interact with the host operating system of SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP. Specifically, I’ll introduce you to a framework that SAP provides as part of the standard to define external commands in a highly portable manner. After explaining the basics of this framework, we will look at an example of how to define and use the external commands.