Th o m a s We i s s , S A P AG
Technical Column
Modification-Free Adaptations of SAP Programs?
With Enhancements, They’re Possible — and Here’s How
Thomas Weiss (thomas.weiss@
sap.com) has a Ph.D. in analytic
philosophy and worked as a
professional writer before he
joined the SAP NetWeaver
Product Management Training
team in 2001, where his
responsibilities included the this framework powers some exciting benefits for
e-learning strategy for ABAP.
After getting increasingly
involved in writing ABAP material
himself, he is now a member of
the SAP NetWeaver Application
Server Product Management
team. The enhancement and
switch framework has been a
topic of primary interest to
Thomas for quite some time.
4 Note!
In the April-June
2008 Under Develop-
ment column, Karl
Kessler described
how to enhance a
Web Dynpro ABAP
application in some
detail. In this article,
I’ll focus on the
structure of such
enhancements and
their basic principles,
rather than imple-
mentation details.
| Under Development
This article appeared in the Jul Aug Sep 2008 issue of SAP Insider and appears here with
n n
permission from the publisher, Wellesley Information Services (WIS), www.WISpubs.com.
One of the great strengths of SAP software has always
been its adaptability — customers can either use a
solution straight out of the box or truly customize it
to their business needs. Until a few years ago, though,
developers had to hard code any changes as modifi-
cations, which would then be swept away should the
company decide to upgrade the core.
But now, as previous Under Development columns
have delved into, there’s a more state-of-the-art
technology to adapt SAP software to your needs: the
switch and enhancement framework.
In addition to the move away from modifications,
SAP customers — you’ve likely heard about the new
enhancement packages for SAP ERP 6.0, or the fact
that SAP now develops all of its industry solutions
(ISs) in one system and delivers them on one set of
DVDs (you simply switch on the solution you need).
These are the switch and enhancement framework’s
most important use cases:
Customers can now adapt SAP code without
modifying it. With the new switch and enhancement
framework, you can use enhancements to change or
add something to SAP standard objects without having
to modify them. Enhancements are almost as flexible
as modifications, and they help you avoid most of
the work that modifications cause in the software life
For an introduction to the switch and enhancement framework, see

“A New and Improved Approach to SAP Industry Solutions — How the
Switch and Enhancement Framework Now Consolidates SAP Industry
Solutions with the ERP Core” by Karl Kessler in the July-September
2005 issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsideronline.com).

For more about the SAP ERP enhancement package strategy, please
see “SAP’s New ERP Strategy for Developers: 4 Ways to Make the Most
of Your SAP ERP System” by Karl Kessler in the July-September 2007
issue of SAP Insider (www.SAPinsideronline.com).

The benefits of enhancements greatly outweigh those of modifications,
and the enhancement framework covers a lot of cases in which
customers want to adapt SAP code to their needs. But there might still
be some cases in which modifications are necessary; I will explain in
more detail later in this article.
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cycle; enhancements are never overwritten in an
upgrade because they are objects in your namespace,
while modifications are part of the object they modify.
So with enhancements, you have most of the advan-
tages of modifications while enjoying a freedom
from most of the work that modifications require in
an upgrade.
All SAP industry solutions are now developed in
the latest ERP system. This translates into substantial
advantages for customers:
 You can install the IS you like based on the latest
SAP ERP release — you need not wait for conflict
resolution transports.
 You can use the latest SAP ERP technology in your
IS — some new logistics features in the IS Oil and
Gas, for example — whereas before you needed
two systems: one for the IS and another system
running the latest version of SAP ERP.
 Accordingly, you now need fewer systems in your
landscape — and this, in turn, means a lower TCO.
Apart from this, by providing all ISs on one set of
DVDs, SAP can offer functionality that can be used
within different ISs. A user of one IS can reuse
functionality from another IS. For example, IS Oil and
Gas customers can reuse all the functionality of the
IS Utilities (as of enhancement package 3). This is a
great advantage: Oil and gas companies can not only
calculate the mineral oil tax and plan the
storage and transport of oil and gas, but — because of
the additional functionality of the IS Utilities — can
also handle mass billing for the end customer.
The enhancement package strategy of SAP ERP
6.0 gives you a new dimension of choices for get-
ting new functionality. In the classic world, you had
Conflict resolution transports (CRTs) resolve conflicts that can arise

between a support package for SAP ERP and an SAP industry solution
or other add-on component.
 to choose whether you wanted to stay on one stable
release or have new functionality. With SAP’s new
enhancement package strategy, you can have all the
advantages of staying on one release and you can get
new functionality — not by an upgrade, but as parts
of enhancement packages. Enhancement packages
provide new features on top of the recent release.
The import of these new features is separate from
their activation. Directly after the import, your sys-
tem behavior is still the same: There are no changes
of user interfaces (UIs) or processes. Once imported,
the sources that realize the new functionality are still
not compiled before they are activated or switched
on. On both levels (import and activation), you have
full choice: Import only what you want and activate
Adding an
additional
UI column
to indicate
frequent
flyers
Adding an additional
details table, which you
access by clicking a new
Show Bookings button
Figure 1 p Adding enhancements to an SAP UI table element
Figure 2 p UI enhancements merge into the SAP standard object screen at compile time
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only the parts of the imported new functions you are
interested in.
In this article, I will focus on the first use case: I’ll
explain the basic advantages that enhancements
have over modifications and walk you through how
to make modification-free adaptations of SAP pro-
grams. In future articles, I’ll demonstrate how these
basic mechanisms are put to work in the reintegra-
tion of SAP industry solutions and ERP enhance-
ment packages. All told, you will learn how the
switch and enhancement framework empowers all
three of these use cases, and you will gain a solid
understanding of this powerful new technology’s
basic structure and concepts.
Enhancements Versus Modifications:
What Are the Key Differences?
Consider a customer who wants to enhance a Web
Dynpro ABAP UI table element by adding an addi-
tional column and a detail table. With the enhance-
ment framework, this is quite easy to achieve: You’d
simply add the screen elements as enhancements —
you’ll then see them in the correct position, both in
the design-time tools and at run time (see Figure 1).
But what is the difference between these enhance-
ments and a normal change of code? The additional
column, the additional table, and a new button
can enhance an SAP object and still be part of your
package as is shown in Figure 1. And still, at run time,
they appear in the correct position as part of a screen
that is an SAP standard object. Your enhancements
merge into the object they enhance at compile time
(see Figure 2). This has one important consequence:
Because this merging is done at compile time,
processing enhancements does not slow down an
application.
The best way to highlight the impressive difference
that enhancements make is to sketch how you would
make the same changes with the classic modification
technology (see Figure 3 on page 52) — specifically,
how do modifications and enhancements fare differ-
ently in an upgrade?
From a technical point of view, a modification is part
of the object it modifies. This explains all of the incon-
veniences that modifications introduce in an upgrade.
A modification is a subtenant in an SAP object, so it
depends on the SAP object far more than enhance-
ments do. Enhancements, on the other hand, are
objects of their own — and they live a life of their own in
packages of their own.
 In an upgrade, a new SAP object substitutes the
old one, and all modifications are lost. Using SAP’s
Modification Assistant (the SAP tool that adjusts
modifications) you can reinsert the modification
semiautomatically or manually (depending on the
4 Note! way the changes in the SAP object affect the position
It is never the change of the modification). But unless you adjust every single
mode, but always the modification in your system after the upgrade, your
new enhancement modifications are gone. You have to touch every sin-
mode, in which you
gle modification after the upgrade — even though
add enhancements
none of the ojects you have modified may have
to an object.
changed in the upgrade.
In contrast, enhancements cause far less work in
an upgrade because they reside in packages, which
Figure 3 p A major inconvenience of all modifications is that they
are overwritten in an upgrade
Figure 4 p An upgrade only overwrites SAP objects; your enhancements are not
touched by an upgrade
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make their lives safer in an upgrade. Consider that
you’ve enhanced an SAP object that will change in
the upgrade; it will be replaced by a different version,
as shown in Figure 4.
At the bottom left corner of Figure 4 (enclosed by
the blue dotted line), you see what happens to our
UI table in an upgrade. The new version of the table,
where we’re back to one less column, substitutes
the old version . But even though the new object
substitutes the SAP standard object, this has no
impact on the enhancements. The upgrade only
affects the SAP objects. Customer’s packages are
not touched in an upgrade, so all your enhance-
ments will survive the upgrade without you having
to lift a finger ( and ). In the next step, the
enhancements are again merged into the SAP object
at compile time .
Easily Exchange a Global Class Method —
A Step-By-Step Description
As simple as it was to add a new column to the UI
table, that alone will not suffice — to populate the
new column with data, you also need enhancements
in the back end. In particular, you have to adapt the
SELECT statement, which retrieves the necessary
data from the database. To give you the real flavor of
how easy it is create back-end enhancements, let’s
walk through how to enhance the method that gets
the data.
It’s important to understand that you can now not
only enhance but substitute an SAP development
object without modifying it. To do this, there is a new
mode for enhancing objects in the ABAP Editor: The
enhancement mode.
. First, you get to the enhancement mode in an anal-
ogous way to how you moved to the change mode
(see Figure 5).
2. Next, create a new container (or use an existing
one) for your enhancements (see Figure 6). I won’t
delve into any details about these containers,
which are called Enhancement Implementations, in
this article; for the most part, they function only as
a useful coating for the enhancements themselves.
As you confirm this dialog window by clicking the
green check mark, you’re ensuring that everything
you now create will be an enhancement — and
therefore will not change, or even touch, the
underlying development object.
. After closing the dialog window, you will see the
screen shown in Figure 7.

You are now in the enhancement mode of class

CL_EXAMPLE_CLASS. In the brackets at the top of
Figure 7, you see information about which con-
tainer your enhancements are stored in.

. For a method of a global class, you have three

options for where to attach an enhancement: a
pre-exit, a post-exit, and an overwrite exit. An Figure 5 p Entering the new enhancement mode from within the ABAP Editor
enhancement attached to a pre-exit is processed
before the method, to a post-exit is processed
after the method, and to an overwrite exit replaces
the implementation of the method at run time.

From a functional perspective, we want to select

one more column in our SELECT statement.
Because it is not possible to add an enhancement
Figure 6 p Choosing a container for your enhancement
within a statement, we have to substitute the
whole statement — so here we’ll select the over-
write method in order to substitute the whole
method implementation.

To do this, select Edit → Enhancement Operations

→ Insert Overwrite-Method (see Figure 8).

5. You will then see an additional button in the row (see

Figure 9). This button represents the enhancement
method, which will substitute the original method.
Figure 7 p The enhancement mode of the global class
6. Click the Overwrite-Exit button to navigate to the
ABAP Editor, where you can implement the over-
write exit code.

Then, when the applications calls the method at

run time, the code of the overwrite method will
execute instead of the original code (see Figure 10
on the next page). And that’s it!

By means of the enhancement framework, all of this

happens without the developer having to change the
original class. The framework knows: If an overwrite
exit is implemented, compile the overwrite method
code instead of the original method.
Figure 8 p Selecting the appropriate option for where to attach the enhancement

Where and How to Enhance an Application:

Lessons Learned
So what does this example teach us? I’d like to
emphasize three main points:

 You cannot add an enhancement to a method of a

global class anywhere you want; you can only
implement or add enhancements at positions Figure 9 p The button leading to the implementation of the overwrite exit

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Figure 10 p The overwrite method code, not the original code, executes at run time
A Detailed Look at Enhancement Options
You can add enhancements not everywhere, but only at so-called
enhancement options. So for customers, it is important to know
which options the system provides and which have to be explic-
itly inserted by an SAP developer. In fact, the framework pro-
vides lots of different enhancement options.
Implicit Enhancement Options
The enhancement framework provides many different implicit
enhancement options, including options for:
 Additional types, attributes, and methods of global classes
 Pre, post, and overwrite methods of global classes
 Optional parameters for methods of global classes and
function modules
The framework’s source code plug-in technology also
provides default positions where you can add source code to
existing source code units. For example, you can add source code
plug-ins at:
 The beginning or end of a method (both of global and local
classes), function module, or form routine
 The end of a local structure
Figure 11 p An enhancement’s code is processed in the middle of
an SAP object, even though the enhancement belongs to the
customer namespace
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where there is an enhancement option, which is
like an exit or a hook for an enhancement (see
sidebar). This is generally true for all types of
enhancements. If there is no option, or no hook,
there is no place for the enhancement to hold on.
At run time, the enhancement option functions as
a jumping off point where the relevant enhance-
ment merges into the code of the enhanced devel-
opment object. And for a method of a global class,
there are only pre, post, and overwrite exits.
 Enhancement options carry information about
where an enhancement should be processed at
 The end of a private, protected, or public section of a
local class
 The end of a report and include
The new Web Dynpro ABAP UI technology offers nearly any
enhancement option you could dream of. Concerning the UI
elements, the enhancement mode offers you almost the same
level of freedom as the change mode. This means you can add any
UI element you want, but you cannot change UI elements. And you
can add the relevant enhancements you need to wire up new UI
elements you may have added — new plug-ins, new methods, or
pre and post methods of existing classes, to name a few. You can
even hide existing UI elements.
Explicit Enhancement Options
Explicit enhancement options (which the developer has to pro-
vide) comprise enhancement points, enhancement sections, and
the new kernel-based Business Add-In (BAdI):
 Enhancement points allow you to insert source code plug-ins.
These are additional code lines that, if they exist, are executed
additionally (see Figure 11).
 Enhancement sections behave the same way, the only difference
being that the source code plug-in replaces the section in the
original code. So an enhancement section is a section that is
flagged for possible substitution.
 The new kernel-based BAdI is now integrated into the enhance-
ment framework. BAdIs are hooks for object plug-ins. A BAdI
definition provides an interface with methods. You enhance a
BAdI by providing a class that implements the BAdI interface. If
you call BAdI methods, you can (among other things) specify
which method implementations are to be carried out on the
basis of filter values. In other words, a BAdI method call is like
a dynamic method call with a specified interface, where it’s
not determined until run time which method implementations
are to take place.
 run time. If an option gets lost or is changed in an
upgrade, the system might no longer know where
to place the enhancement. To support you in this
situation, the transaction SPAU_ENH shows you
which enhancements you have to adjust after an
upgrade, which support packages to install, or
which transports to import.
 The kind of enhancement you want to attach must
fit the enhancement option. For example, you can
only attach an overwrite method to an overwrite
exit, or new methods to an enhancement option
for new methods. In other words, you can attach
different kinds of objects on different kinds of hooks.
Enhancement Options: Implicit and Explicit
Global and local classes, function modules, reports,
includes, and Web Dynpro ABAP views offer a lot of
different enhancement options without anyone having
to do additional work. They are much like default
exits, which the framework automatically provides in
the respective development unit. This means, for
example, that whenever you have a method of a
global class, the framework automatically provides
pre, post, and overwrite exits. This is why they are
called implicit enhancement options.
In addition to implicit enhancement options, which
the framework supplies, there are also explicit
enhancement options, which have to be clearly
defined by an SAP application developer, for example,
who anticipates that a customer might want to select
more columns from the database than the original
program does. Here, the developer could insert an
explicit enhancement option. This way, another devel-
oper could implement this enhancement option with-
out changing the original development unit.
An interesting note: While implementing an
enhancement option is not a modification for a cus-
tomer, inserting an explicit enhancement option into
the original SAP program does modify the program.
For modification-free adaptations of SAP objects, cus-
tomers depend on the existing enhancement options.
If you need to add some code at a position where there
is no enhancement option, you still have to modify the
object. (This is why I earlier referred to enhancements
as being almost as flexible as modifications.)
Conclusion
SAP’s new enhancement framework makes customer
adaptations of SAP objects far more robust in an
upgrade — and creates far less post-upgrade work
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for developers. In contrast to modifications, which
are part of the object they modify and are lost in
an upgrade, enhancements are never overwritten
in an upgrade because they live in the customer
namespace.
To implement enhancements, developers have to
assign them to enhancement options, which carry
information about where the enhancement should
be processed at run time. The framework provides
many different implicit enhancement options, but
developers can also add explicit enhancement
options. In the rare case that an enhancement option
is affected by an upgrade, a new support package, or
an import, a new transaction (SPAU_ENH) will alert
In contrast to modifica-
you so that you can then insert the untouched
tions, which are part
enhancements somewhere else.
of the object they
Modification-free enhancements are one important modify and are lost
use case of the switch and enhancement framework. in an upgrade,
Look for future Under Development columns that will enhancements are
cover how the framework empowers the reintegration never overwritten in
of SAP industry solutions in the SAP ERP core, the an upgrade because
new enhancement package strategy of SAP ERP 6.0, they live in the
customer namespace.
and the benefits of each. With an understanding of
these additional use cases, you will gain an even
deeper understanding of the power of the framework
and its benefits for developers. n
AdditionalResources...
...from
 “Introducing the Enhancement Framework
— a new way to enhance SAP programs without
having to modify them” by Thomas Weiss
and Michael Acker (SAP Professional Journal ,
January/February 2008, www.SAPpro.com)
 “Introducing the switch and enhancement
framework — consolidating industry
solutions with the mySAP ERP core” by
Karl Kessler (SAP Professional Journal ,
March/April 2006, www.SAPpro.com)
 “A New and Improved Approach to SAP
Industry Solutions — How the Switch and
Enhancement Framework Now Consolidates
SAP Industry Solutions with the ERP Core,”
an Under Development column by Karl
Kessler (SAP Insider, July-September 2005,
www.SAPinsideronline.com)