Fill BAPI extension structure or extract

This topic is not related to a brand new technology, but provides a convenient, safe and transparent way to fill in BAPI extension structures. BAPIs are the functional APIs of SAP exposed to the outside world via RFC protocol. They are technically function modules marked as available remotely.

Extension structures are provided by SAP to be able to access customer fields via the BAPI added to SAP DDIC structures / tables previously.

      CALL FUNCTION 'BAPI_ALM_NOTIF_CREATE'
        EXPORTING
          notif_type         = lv_notif_type
          notifheader        = ls_notifheader
        IMPORTING
          notifheader_export = es_notifheader_e
        TABLES
          notitem            = lt_notitem
          notifpartnr        = lt_notifpartnr
          longtexts          = lt_longtexts
          return             = lt_return
          extensionin        = lt_extensionin
          extensionout       = lt_extensionout.

These extension structures are however “not typed“. Not typed means that extensionin/extensionout are table types based on row types which is a long character sequence separated in 4 fields.

The customer fields from the customer include BAPI_TE_QMEL can be filled into the BAPIPAREX structure. Due external communication via RFC, only character type fields can be appended and moved in/out. Conversion from other data types like integer, decimal etc. are your task in advance.

To do the move properly, a utility method cl_abap_container_utilities=>fill_container_c is available in ABAP.

    DATA:
      ls_header_ext     TYPE bapi_te_qmel,
      lv_container      TYPE c length 960,
      ls_extension      TYPE bapiparex.
    
    "Fill in fields into the customer include structure ls_header_ext here
    
    "Move typed structure to the BAPI extension structure
    cl_abap_container_utilities=>fill_container_c( EXPORTING im_value = ls_header_ext IMPORTING ex_container = lv_container ).
    ls_extension-structure = 'BAPI_TE_QMEL'.
    ls_extension+30 = lv_container.

    APPEND ls_extension TO rt_extension."of type TT_BAPIPAREX

What You see on the above snippet is that we use a helper variable of length 4×240 = 960 for the valueparts, which is filled in by the container utility from our typed DDIC structure. So far so good, we did a safe and easy operation using the utility class. What does then ls_extension+30 do ? Since the first field in BAPIPAREX structure is the field holding the type of the original content, it will occupy the first 30 characters. So we can start at character number 31 only. The + 30 is shifting the start position on the target of the move statement. You can do this with any character typed variables in ABAP.

The extraction is the reverse direction using cl_abap_container_utilities=>read_container_c. Good luck programmer 🙂