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Definition

Central maintenance and transport objects (also known as maintenance objects) are collections of tables which constitute logical business entities, and must therefore be maintained and transported together.

You specify attributes to determine how these objects are maintained and transported. There are several different object categories, which are handled differently when transporting between different clients and systems.

Depending on the complexity of an object, it is possible to restrict the maintenance or display of existing data to partial views of a maintenance object. In a business application, there can be several specific instances of each defined object, and they can be used in any work areas.

Example

For condition tables concerned with pricing, you need only one maintenance object - "Pricing". You can then use this object in any application that deals with pricing. It is neither necessary, nor does it make sense, to define different maintenance objects to access the same logical data structure from different applications.

Use

Maintenance objects allow you to maintain collections of tables that form logical business entities together. Defining business data as maintenance objects supports object-oriented handling of table contents. This means that you make selections, and perform maintenance and transports, at object level rather than at table level.

If you extend the generated table maintenance dialogs by developing your own user exits, you can include these in the maintenance object definitions.

Structure

A maintenance object consists of:

  • Object short name and header data.

    This includes general information, such as client-(in)dependence, language, or object category. You only have to maintain short names for individual transaction objects. The names of other maintenance objects are taken from the ABAP Dictionary, or from the logical transport object definition.

  • Table object list.

    The table object list includes all the tables (except those of table class L), which are defined as belonging to the object, and must therefore be maintained and transported together. This is required so that the maintained table records for transport can be included in change requests.

    The table object list for tables and views (maintenance and help views) is filled automatically when the maintenance dialog is generated. For logical transport objects, the table object list is maintained when the transport object is created.

    If necessary, you can extend the table object lists of tables and views manually.

  • Method table

    You can store function modules here as methods, which are used to manipulate a given object. At present, this is possible only for special internal SAP areas.