Working with the Tools 

You can reach all the Workbench tools from the initial screen of the ABAP Workbench. In addition to the standard System and Help menus the top level of the Workbench offers the following menus:

Menu

Explanation

Overview

Provides tools that help you survey the objects in your system. You use the functions in this menu to locate objects by application, type, or development class.

Development

Contains tools that you use for creating SAP applications. The tools that appear in the toolbar also appear in this menu.

Test

Contains tools that let you test a completed program.

Utilities

Contains tools related to but not directly required by the development process.

When you select a tool, for example, the Editor, the system displays its initial screen. The initial screen of each tool is a selection screen:

On the selection screen, you can either choose an existing development object or create a new object. In addition to selecting an object, you can choose on the selection screen the object component you want to display or change. For example, from the initial screen of the Editor you can look at a program's source code, variants, attributes, documentation, or text elements.

At the tool level, the menu bar is an application menu bar. The title of the far left menu is the object type a particular tool is concerned with. In the ABAP Editor, this is the Program menu, since you use the Editor to write ABAP programs. The menu bar in each tool also contains the following tools:

Menu

Explanation

Edit

Contains functions that affect small parts of the object that you are editing. For example, Cut, Copy, Paste.

Goto

Contains functions that display information and screens related to the current object type.

Utilities

Contains functions which are not object-specific. For example, general deletion, copying or printing functions.

Environment

Contains functions that start other related applications

After you use a initial screen to select an object, you can choose to Display, Change, and, where appropriate, Test the object. The tool then loads the object.