Data Elements 

A data element (elementary type) describes the technical attributes and meaning of a table field or structure field. Fields with the same meaning refer to the same data element.

A data element has a type and can be referenced with in ABAP programs with TYPE. As a result, variables that take on the type attributes of a data element can be defined in an ABAP program.

The type attributes of a data element (standard data type in the ABAP Dictionary, field length and possibly number of decimal places) are copied from the domain of the data element.

The field CONNID (flight class) of table SBOOK refers to the data element S_CONN_ID. This data element gets its technical attributes (data type NUMC, field length 4) from domain S_CONN_ID. The data element S_CONN_ID describes the technical attributes and meaning of the field CONNID (and all other table fields that refer to this data element).

A variable having the type of data element S_CONN_ID can be defined in an ABAP program with the statement DATA CONNID TYPE S_CONN_ID.

A data element also contains semantic information. This information is valid for each table field or structure field referring to this data element.

The semantic information includes the display of the field on the screen using key word text, column headers for list output of the table contents, and output editing using parameter IDs.

This is also true for online field documentation. The text appearing in a field of an input template for the field help (F1 help) comes from the corresponding data element.

See also:

Creating Data Elements