Glossary

This new infrastructure combines various technologies such as CDS (Core Data Services), BOPF (Business Object Processing Framework), SADL (Service Adaption Description Language) and SAP Gateway. It is introduced with SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.5.

ABAP CDS entities (also referred as CDS entities) are data models based on the DDL (Data Definition Language) specification and are managed by the ABAP Dictionary.

Currently, the following types of ABAP CDS entities are supported:

• ABAP CDS views
• ABAP CDS table functions.

An ABAP CDS view (also referred as CDS view) is defined for existing database tables, database views, or for other CDS views by using the ABAP CDS statement DEFINE VIEW within a DDL source.

A CDS view serves to define the structure of an SQL view and represents a projection onto one or several ABAP Dictionary tables or ABAP Dictionary views.

For each CDS view, two objects are created in the ABAP Dictionary:

• An SQL view
• The actual CDS entity.

An active document represents the state of a business entity (a business object, nodes of a business object) which is stored in the existing persistence (or original persistence).

SAP S/4HANA On-Premise or SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition backend system

The Business Object Processing Framework (in short: BOPF) is an ABAP OO-based framework that provides a set of generic services and functionalities to speed up, standardize, and modularize development of business applications.

It manages the entire life cycle of business objects and covers all aspects of business application development. Furthermore, BOPF is a fundamental technology of the ABAP Application Framework.

In BOPF, a business object is represented as a hierarchical tree of nodes. A single node includes a set of semantically related attributes and the corresponding business logic. For each node, several types of entities can be defined to describe the specific business logic part of the business object.

CDS provides an infrastructure for defining and consuming semantically rich data models in SAP HANA.

In particular, ABAP CDS provides a framework for defining and consuming semantic data models on the central database of the application server AS ABAP. The specified data models are based on the data definition language (DDL) and the data control language (DCL).

Annotations describe semantics related to business data.

An annotation enriches a definition of a model element in the CDS with metadata. It can be specified for specific scopes of a CDS objects, namely specific places in a piece of CDS source code.

Data model that represents an OData service by bundling a set of SAP Gateway service artifacts for a specific use-case (consumption).

Root entity that represents a certain self-contained business object and is used to define a people-centric view on respective business information.

ABAP development object used to define an ABAP CDS entity (for example, a CDS view).

After creation of a DDL source, the developer is able to use the standard functions of the ABAP Workbench - such as syntax check, activation, or connecting to the Transport Organizer. The developer creates a DDL source with the help of a wizard in ABAP Development Tools.

A draft document represents the transient state of a business entity (a business object, nodes of a business object) until it is permanently stored in the original persistency as an active document. A draft document is used to store inactive data in the draft persistency until its transition to an active document.

Enterprise Procurement Model (in short: EPM) is a demo application that integrates many SAP NetWeaver technologies used by SAP Business Suite applications.

It is intended to be used for demonstration and testing purposes in the SAP NetWeaver technology stack. This demo application is based on real-world business logic and scenarios that can be used for various testing approaches and also provides you with utilities to generate meaningful test data.

The CDS data model (CDS views), along with the CDS annotations fully specify the resulting OData model and the runtime behavior - without any additional metadata or OData-specific implementation.

Exposure means that the related CDS views, including all extensions and all applicable annotations, are mapped to a corresponding OData service.

Full text searching (or just text search) provides the capability to identify natural-language terms that satisfy a query and, optionally, to sort them by relevance (ranking) to the query.

Fuzzy search is a fast and fault-tolerant search feature of SAP HANA. The concept behind the fault-tolerant search means that a database query returns records even if the search term (user input) contains additional or missing characters, or other types of spelling errors.

SAP Gateway system

The Open Data (in short: OData) protocol is a Web protocol for querying and updating data. It applies several Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol, and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications.

OData is based on industry standards and offers database-like access to business data using REST-based (Representational State Transfer) architecture.

Service Adaptation Description Language (in short: SADL) is an ABAP technology that enables the consumption of entity relationship-like data models in ABAP based on a model-driven approach.

In context of SAP HANA, SADL enables fast read access to database data for scenarios on mobile and desktop applications using query push-down.

SAP Fiori is the new user experience (UX) for SAP software that applies modern design principles. SAP solutions, such as the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, are using the SAP Fiori UX to provide a personalized, responsive, and simple user experience.

Interface for communication between SAP backend system and external applications using the CPI-C protocol

SAP Gateway handles the communication between a client and the SAP Business Suite backend and is available as an SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP (AS ABAP) add-on, which you can be installed on top of SAP Business Suite application platform. SAP Gateway uses OData services to provide backend data and functions, and processes HTTPS requests for OData services.