My first encounter with ADT Feature Explorer

[Former Member]

Hello altogether,

I joined the openSAP course ABAP development for SAP HANA which started recently. All you need is an AWS account to get access to ABAP for HANA in the SAP Cloud appliances space. Part of the cloud Installation is version 2.28 of ADT.

Setup was fastly done and after entering a valid license key for the development Edition I could start with ABAP development in ADT.

To shortly introduce me: I work as an independent SAP BW Consultant with strong ABAP knowledge. I began SAP ABAP development in 2001. Before that I did development with MS Access and have also two years professional JAVA development under my belt.  I program most of the time in SAP BW projects ( variable exists, planning functions but also Z-programs or classes to extend available functionality).

As I knew Eclipse from my experiences as JAVA developer some years ago, I was really excited to see how ABAP in Eclipse will look. I knew the former problems with the right Versions of the JAVA Plug-Ins and their dependencies, This was always a great trouble in the JAVA Projects. So this offer from SAP with a pre-installed development Environment in the cloud wroks perfect for me! You Need nothing to do, just click and execute and everything works. You did a perfect Job, guys!

As first thing I started the Feature Explorer tour. As I already knew Eclipse, the first part was very easy. I created a new ABAP development project! After getting through all stages of the Feature explorer, I think, it was really helpfull to get to know the short-cuts to different functions like code Navigation, code completion. If you're completely new to Eclipse you may need a short introduction into the different perspectives and what they are for.

My favourite feature was the possibility to start as many ABAP development objects as you Need from the ADT. This means: You can start any transaction in the SAP backend and it will be displayed in Eclipse. I started different Transactions which I normally use likea RSA1, RSD1, SE09, STMS and I could open more than six Transactions at the same time. This is very cool! With the ADT you're no longer stuck to the Maximum of six open GUI sessions in parallel. When developing a data model and devloping ABAP in parallel this gets a hassle very fast. See a sceenshot how ADT looked after starting several transactions:

That's really cool and very helpfull! Thanks a lot for this!

I will now continue with further exploration and see if there are other cool new features!

Best regards,

Jürgen