This documentation provides a quick start for developers who want to put the Application Log in their applications.

Detailed documentation on all function modules, and so on, can be found in the system by executing the program SBAL_DOCUMENTATION.

The Application Log is a tool for collecting messages, saving, reading and deleting logs in the database and displaying logs.

Situations can arise at runtime in application programs which must be brought to the attention of the user in some way. These are usually errors. It can also be useful to report a successful completion (this should not be so often as to overload the user with unimportant information). We are not distinguishing here between Exceptions, Errors, Messages, and so on.

We will not distinguish between exceptions, errors, messages, and so on here. The only important this is that there is a situation where specific information comes into being (usually a T100 message or a message text with an exception) which is either displayed in the log immediately or later. This information is called a message here.

These messages are not to be output individually (with the ABAP commands MESSAGE and Raise), they are to be collected and displayed later as a log.

This set of messages is a log. Logs usually also contain general header information (log type, creator, creation time, etc.) Several logs can be created in a transaction. A transaction can generate several logs.

The Application Log provides an infrastructure for collecting messages, saving them in the database and displaying them as a log.

The application log is used to temporarily store messages. The logs should be deleted in intervals. Data that, for reasons of revision security, have to be available for a long period of time, should not be stored with the application log but with the change documents.

This Quickstart explains this infrastructure and some conventions.