Archiving: Technical Background 

The IDoc archiving tools were developed with the Archive Development Kit (ADK), which supports object-oriented programming methods. This has led to the use of archiving object IDOC, which contains the necessary database tables and the archiving class IDOC, which has the function modules required for processing.

The archiving object IDOC is accessed “from outside” using reports which (indirectly) call the ADK function modules. The selection parameters for these reports are configured in the variant maintenance function for the central archiving transaction. The ADK function modules, in turn, use the function modules from archiving class IDOC to access the database tables. The figure below illustrates this object-oriented structure.

All the function modules in the archiving class “IDOC” belong to the function group “EDIA”. This group also includes the function modules which the archiving programs use to call the ADK functions.

 

In computer literature, data and the corresponding functions are sometimes combined in “classes” (for example, in C++). Here this would refer to the “archiving object” which contains the data (the lines in the database table), as well as the “archiving class” IDOC, which contains the corresponding functions.

The reports supplied with the standard system can be used as sample reports to write your own reports with selection parameters which meet your requirements. For more information on Standard Reports, see Archiving: Description of Standard Reports.