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Demystifying Field Groups in

Field groups in ABAP are pointers to existing fields that do not reserve storage space, making them suitable for handling large datasets efficiently. They allow dynamic modification until their first usage in an EXTRACT statement, which fixes the structure of the corresponding extract record. Field groups are recommended for processing lists with significant records, as they are stored more efficiently and offer better performance compared to internal tables.

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5 views5 pages

Demystifying Field Groups in

Field groups in ABAP are pointers to existing fields that do not reserve storage space, making them suitable for handling large datasets efficiently. They allow dynamic modification until their first usage in an EXTRACT statement, which fixes the structure of the corresponding extract record. Field groups are recommended for processing lists with significant records, as they are stored more efficiently and offer better performance compared to internal tables.

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viceawork05
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Demystifying Field Groups in ABAP

ABAPers normally doesn’t have much information about the Field


Groups as they are rarely used in the normal course of programming.
These are more ABAP-HR relevant, still a must for an ABAP
progrmmer.

Brief Definition

A field group does not reserve storage space for the fields but
contains pointers to existing fields.> Internal take up memory.
Depending on how much memory your system has . > Once you have
declared the possible record types as field groups and defined their
structure you can fill the extract dataset using the following
statements: EXTRACT. When the first EXTRACT statement occurs in a
program the system creates the extract dataset and adds the first
extract record to it. In each subsequent EXTRACT statement the new
extract record is added to the dataset EXTRACT HEADER. When you
extract the data the record is filled with the current values of the
corresponding fields. As soon as the system has processed the first
EXTRACT statement for a field group the structure of the
corresponding extract record in the extract dataset is fixed. You can
no longer insert new fields into the field groups and HEADER. If you
try to modify one of the field groups afterwards and use it in another
EXTRACT statement a runtime error occurs. By processing EXTRACT
statements several times using different field groups you fill the
extract dataset with records of different length and structure. Since
you can modify field groups dynamically up to their first usage in an
EXTRACT statement extract datasets provide the advantage that you
need not determine the structure at the beginning of the program.

Helper Statements

Field group works in conjuction with

INSERT f1 f2 INTO fg
EXTRACT fg
SORT BY fg
LOOP … ENDLOOP

INSERT f1 f2 INTO fg
———————

The insert statement is used to create a field group dynamically by


inserting the field into it. Only global data fields can be inserted and
not local data fields eg : in form modules.

EXTRACT fg
———-

This will combine all the fields in the fieldgroup and write them to a
sequential dataset as a single record.

SORT BY fg
———-

Sorting of sequential dataset by field group.

LOOP AND ENDLOOP


—————

LOOP.
AT ***
……
….
ENDAT.
AT ***
…..
….
ENDAT.
ENDLOOP.

When to Use Field Groups

Because field-groups write their data to paging space (rather than


storing it in memory), they are appropriate only for processing lists
with lots (like 50,000 or more) of records. If you expect your programs
to be handling tens of thousands of records, you should:
analyze the expected size of your lists. For instance, if your system
has 512M of main memory, you may decide that you don’t want any
report to use more than 15M of memory for its lists. In that program,
you may have a list:
begin of mylist occurs XXX,
dat1(100) type c,
dat2(50) type c,
dat3(10) type c,
end of list.
Then each record takes up approximately 160 bytes; so every 6
records take up approximately 1K. For this list structure, it would take
about 90,000 records to use up 15M RAM. Decide the maximum
amount of memory you want your program to use decide whether to
use field-groups or something else (like internal tables). If you expect
the size of your list to be greater than the amount of memory you
want your program to use, then use field-groups (actually, if you use
internal tables, and the number of records exceeds the number of
records in your OCCURS statement, the system just writes those extra
records to the paging space. So is there really any difference between
just using an internal table with an OCCURS 0 statement– which
would write the entire table to paging space– and using field-groups?
According to Gareth M. de Bruyn and Robert Lyfareff in Introduction to
ABAP/4 Programming for SAP, field-groups are stored more efficiently,
and have better performance. They recommend field-groups for lists
of 100,000 or more records).

Sample Code

The sample code that explains this concept best is

*&———————————————————————*
*& Report ZSPFLI *
*& *
*&———————————————————————*

REPORT ZSPFLI LINE-SIZE


132 LINE-COUNT 65(3)
NO
STANDARD PAGE HEADING.
TABLES:SPFLI,SCARR, SFLIGHT, SBOOK.
SELECT-OPTIONS: MYCARRID FOR SPFLI-CARRID.
FIELD-GROUPS: HEADER, SPFLI_FG, SFLIGHT_FG, SBOOK_FG.

INSERT:
SPFLI-CARRID
SPFLI-CONNID
SFLIGHT-FLDATE
SBOOK-BOOKID
INTO HEADER,

SPFLI-CARRID
SPFLI-CONNID
SPFLI-CITYFROM
SPFLI-AIRPFROM
SPFLI-CITYTO
SPFLI-AIRPTO
SPFLI-DEPTIME
SCARR-CARRNAME
INTO SPFLI_FG,

SFLIGHT-FLDATE
SFLIGHT-SEATSMAX
SFLIGHT-SEATSOCC
SFLIGHT-PRICE
INTO SFLIGHT_FG,

SBOOK-BOOKID
SBOOK-CUSTOMID
SBOOK-CUSTTYPE
SBOOK-SMOKER
INTO SBOOK_FG.

SELECT * FROM SPFLI WHERE CARRID IN MYCARRID.


SELECT SINGLE * FROM SCARR WHERE CARRID = SPFLI-CARRID.
EXTRACT SPFLI_FG.

SELECT * FROM SFLIGHT


WHERE CARRID = SPFLI-CARRID AND CONNID = SPFLI-CONNID.
EXTRACT SFLIGHT_FG.

SELECT * FROM SBOOK


WHERE CARRID = SFLIGHT-CARRID AND
CONNID = SFLIGHT-CONNID AND FLDATE = SFLIGHT-FLDATE.
EXTRACT SBOOK_FG.
CLEAR SBOOK.
ENDSELECT.
CLEAR SFLIGHT.
ENDSELECT.
CLEAR SPFLI.
ENDSELECT.

SORT.
LOOP.
AT SPFLI_FG.
FORMAT COLOR COL_HEADING.
WRITE: / SCARR-CARRNAME,
SPFLI-CONNID, SPFLI-CITYFROM,
SPFLI-AIRPFROM, SPFLI-CITYTO, SPFLI-AIRPTO, SPFLI-DEPTIME.
FORMAT COLOR OFF.
ENDAT.

AT SFLIGHT_FG.
WRITE: /15 SFLIGHT-FLDATE, SFLIGHT-PRICE, SFLIGHT-SEATSMAX,
SFLIGHT-SEATSOCC.
ENDAT.

AT SBOOK_FG.
WRITE: /30 SBOOK-BOOKID, SBOOK-CUSTOMID,
SBOOK-CUSTTYPE, SBOOK-SMOKER.
ENDAT.
ENDLOOP.

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