TABLE in a class

Question

I am new to ABAP, however I'd prefer to use ABAP objects if possible. Do I understand that a class cannot contain the TABLES keyword!!!  If so what strategy do I use such that a class or instanciated object may own it's own data. In other words the class would query the database and the resultset would be exposed through an interface. I looked at persistence, but I don't think that would always be appropriate. What is the "best practice" in this case?
Message was edited by: EvilWonka

Answer 1

Hi,
some comments;
the TABLES statement is obsolete and should not be used any more, except for one single reason: as interface work area for exchanging data with Dynpros. For technical reasons, it is still necessary there.
Also outside ABAP Objects, TABLES should not be used to declare work areas for Open SQL statements and the short forms of Open SQL statements as shown in Nablan's answer (no INTO clause) should not be used either!
The reason is, that the TABLES statement is about eightfold overloaded and serves too much different purposes. It allows implicit behavior of many different statements, that make a program quiet obscure.
As for Open SQL, you shold always create work areas explicitly with DATA and fill them with the INTO clause.
The recommendation is, to put functional coding only into methods, because syntax constructs, that are declared as obsolete, are forbiddem there. The only reason, that the syntax is allowed outside classes is the downward compatibility of ABAP.
Regards
Horst
PS: Since ABAP is historically grown as a procedural language and ABAP Objects is an addon, we have in fact less object oriented concepts for things like strings or collections. Where Jave uses classes, ABAP mostly uses statements and concepts built in to the language. Instead of collections, ABAP offers internal tables (complex data objects with dynamic size).