ABAP Projects

An ABAP project plays a mediating role between an ABAP back-end system and the Eclipse-based IDE, and it provides a framework for creating, processing, and testing development objects.

An ABAP project always represents a real system logon and additionally offers a user-specific view of all ABAP development objects of the backend system.

The specification for an ABAP project contains the following items:

• Project name
• System data - This includes specifications of the system ID,the client, user, and password.
• Default language - ABAP-project-specific preference for predefining the original language of the development objects that are created as well as the language of the messages and UI texts. NOTE: The default language of an ABAP project cannot be changed.
• (Optional) List of the ABAP packages that are listed as favorites in the project.

As with all other project types in Eclipse, ABAP projects, too, form part of a user-specific workspace and thus define the starting point for all development activities within the new IDE. As a rule, several ABAP projects are contained in a workspace. This means, in particular, that the ABAP developer can work on multiple ABAP systems in one and the same IDE session, without leaving the immediate work environment. This can be very useful whenever, for example, the status of development objects from the original development system is to be compared with the status in the consolidation system.

ABAP projects can only be processed if there is an existing system connection (to the ABAP backend). It is therefore not possible to have read or write access to the content of an ABAP project in offline mode.

The structure of an ABAP project is usually displayed in the Project Explorer. The root of an ABAP project contains a list of ABAP packages that are itemized either under the favorites list (as Favorite Packages) or the System Library node.