Processing a Form

As illustrated under Form Logic: Introduction, you use the tree structure in the Form Builder (which at the same time serves as navigation tree) to describe the form logic of your form and to determine when to print texts, graphics, and other elements in your form. The Smart Form you describe in the Form Builder is nothing but a description of what you want to print. To really print these contents, you activate your Smart Form and thus generate a function module that contains the appropriate ABAP statements. When generating this function module, SAP Smart Forms processes the tree structure of the Smart Forms, meaning that it processes all nodes of the form. It then uses the generated ABAP program coding to actually print the form contents.

For each node type there is an appropriate output control, which is reflected in the generated program coding and, of course, in the output. To fully understand the form logic, you must know when which output areas are processed. The elementary nodes are not explained here because their only task is to fill these output areas.

Classification of the different output controls

If you consider the output controls of all node types together, you find the rules for processing a Smart Form (see: Summary).