Maintenance Views

Use

Maintenance views offer an easy way of maintaining complex application objects.

Data distributed to several tables forms a logical unit for the user, such as an application object. You want to be able to display, modify and create the data of such an application object together. The user is not interested in the technical implementation of the application object, that is, in the distribution of the data to several tables.

A maintenance view allows you to maintain the data of an application object together. The system automatically distributes the data in the underlying database tables. The maintenance status determines which accesses to the data of the underlying tables are possible with the maintenance view.

Features

All the tables in a maintenance view must be linked with foreign keys, that is, the join conditions for maintenance views are always derived from the foreign key. For more information, see Foreign Key Relationship and Join Condition . You cannot directly enter the join conditions as for database views.

There are some restrictions for the attributes of the foreign keys with which the tables in a maintenance view can be linked (see Restrictions for Maintenance and Help Views ). In the following figure you can see the relations between an application, a maintenance view and the database.

A standardized table maintenance transaction is provided (transaction code SM30) that allows you to maintain the data from the base tables of a maintenance view together.

Maintenance mechanisms such as screens and processing programs must be created from the view definition. To do this, open the tool by selecting the view in the Repository Browser and then choose Utilities → Table Maintenance Generator or use transaction Generate Table View (transaction code SE54). This makes it possible to create easy-to-use maintenance interfaces in a simple manner.

You can find out how to create such maintenance mechanisms in the documentation BC - Generate Table Maintenance Dialog . The following figure gives an example how an input mask that is generated from the maintenance view works.