Creating Complex Lists 

Lists are the output medium for structured, formatted data from ABAP programs. Each program can produce up to 21 lists, one basic list and 20 secondary lists. The basic list is the standard screen of an executable program (report). You can display the basic list in a transaction using the LEAVE TO LIST-PROCESSING statement. This section deals with creating lists in general. That means, most of the statements described here apply to basic as well as to secondary lists. By default, the system transfers the output of a program to the basic list. In most cases, the basic list is the only list of a program. For this reason, the examples in this section mainly deal with the basic list. For information on how to program secondary lists, see Interactive Lists.

From within your ABAP program, you can either output a list on the screen or send it to the SAP spool system. By default, the list is displayed on the screen. All examples in this section use the default. For information on how to print lists, see Printing Lists.

The basic ABAP statement for writing data to lists is the WRITE statement. Other output statements are ULINE and SKIP. For details concerning these three statements, see Creating Simple Lists with the WRITE Statement.

The following topics describe the structure of a list and the options you have to layout a list when creating it: