You can conveniently maintain table contents in a standard maintenance dialog with the extended table maintenance. It is irrelevant whether you access the data via a table or a view. You can work with the same interface and functionality in both cases.

The generation of maintenance modules for the table or view in question is a prerequisite. The generation can be called for the current table or view from within the Workbench or directly in the Dictionary via a function.

To call the maintenance dialog for a particular table or view, either a specific transaction must have been defined, with which you then go directly to the maintenance, or you call the general maintenance transaction und specify the table or view name. If modifications were made in the maintenance dialog for a table or view, they apply however you entered the maintenance.

When the extended table maintenance is called, a work area is fetched from the database into an internal buffer for processing on the screen. Either all entries in the database are fetched into the work area, or the selection can be restricted in a view definition or in the calling program.

Field contents are maintained in an internal buffer, so the database is not automatically accessed after each individual record has been maintaIned. Changes made are only copied from the internal buffer to the database when save is chosen. This buffering gives the maintenance procedure a transaction orientation. This gives you the possibility of discarding changes before the database access (user-controlled "rollback") and allows consistency checks for all changed data, before it is written to the database.

The following diagram illustrates the extended table maintenance using two views as examples: