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Enhance All Layers of an Application with the New and Classic Enhancement Technologies

by Thomas Weiss, Product Manager, SAP NetWeaver Product Management Application Server ABAP, SAP AG (June 2009)

Working in cooperation with the classic append technology, the Enhancement Framework enables you to enhance all levels of an application from the Web Dynpro ABAP user interface over the application logic to the database layer. By going through a comprehensive example you will learn how to use the Enhancement Framework and discover the underlying principles and structures that make this technology so easy to work with.

Key Concept

The Enhancement Framework is the new technology for adapting SAP applications to meet business needs. If customers need to change or enhance an SAP application, they should use the Enhancement Framework instead of the classic modification technology.

In a three-part article series I show you how to work with the Enhancement Framework, how to profit from its features, and how in principle an enhancement project is organized. I explain how this new framework allows customers to adapt SAP standard code without modifications. At the positions at which the customer adds something to or changes the code of a standard SAP object to enhance it, the new code can be added as an enhancement in its own package and is merged in at compile time in the original position of the underlying SAP development object. This way the enhancement is available at runtime as a part of the code it enhances, but from a transport perspective, it is the customer who owns the code. Because enhancements are objects themselves and owned by the customer, they are never overwritten in an upgrade, and the adjustment effort needed after an upgrade or installation of a Support Package (SP) is by far less than with the classic modification technology.

Note
I recommend that you read my article, which I co-authored with Michael Acker, “Introducing the Enhancement Framework — a new way to enhance SAP programs without having to modify them,” which was posted to the SAP Professional Journal knowledgebase in January 2008.

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