Defining a structure in a report
How do I define a structure in a report?

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I assume you've looked at the technical information for a field on a screen, which contains the data you wish to find programmatically. And you've found that, rather than a table, you've got a structure name. This is because with screens, the table or structure name provided merely defines a holder for the field value. If you see a table name, then that is just fortunate -- the system is simply using the table name to provide a structure for the data. But it could be populated from anywhere.

For example, I could define a screen with a field mara-matnr. In the PBO, I could have some code that says "MARA-MATNR = 'MY_MATERIAL'". When the screen is displayed, the field will contain the value 'MY_MATERIAL'. At no point has a database read been done.

So, how can you find where the fields are actually populated? The most widely used tools are SQL Trace, Run Time Analysis and of course the debugger. These techniques, and others, are widely available across the Internet.

This was first published in April 2008