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Technical Specification

Note: Currently, ABAP file formats are not kept stable, yet. They might still change incompatibly without creating a new file format version.

Table of Contents

File Names

The ABAP file formats specify file content and unique file names for ABAP repository objects.

The mapping of repository objects to file names follows the pattern

<object_name>.<object_type>.
  [<sub_object_name>.<sub_object_type>.]
  [<content_type>.][<language>.]
<file_extension>

with the mandatory elements object_name, object_type and file_extension. Namespaces are converted into brackets, for instance /NMSPC/CL_OBJECT becomes (nmspc)cl_object. For every objects there is a file <object_name>.<object_type>.json, referred to as metadata file with content such as description text, original language and other (non-redundant) metadata.

Object Name and Type

The object name (R3TR) and object type are derived from the object itself, as stored in the ABAP object directory (aka TADIR).

Sub Object Name and Sub Object Type

Some object types support sub objects (LIMU object types) like function modules in a function group. For sub objects, the main object name and type must be part of the file name.

E.g., for function module FUNCTION_EXISTS in function group SUNI, the file name would be suni.fugr.function_exists.func.abap.

Content Type

If an object needs multiple files which are not represented by transport objects, the content type is used to differentiate between the different file types. Examples for classes are the test-classes or text elements:

cl_oo_clif_source.clas.testclasses.abap
cl_oo_clif_source.clas.texts.en.properties

Language

The language of the texts is encoded by the element language following BCP47.

cl_oo_clif_source.clas.texts.en.properties
cl_oo_clif_source.clas.texts.en-GB.properties

For the text elements of classes, this language will be the original language (provided by the metadata file).

File Extensions

ABAP file formats use the file types:

  • .abap stores ABAP source code as plain text
  • .acds stores source code of ABAP Core Data Services (CDS) as plain text
  • .json stores content of form-based editors or properties of objects, such as originalLanguage, abapLanguageVersion and others. Details are found in JSON Files in ABAP File Formats
  • .properties stores text elements as plain text and translation texts
  • .xdp stands for XML Data Packaging and is part of Form Objects (SFPF)
  • .csn is a notation for compact representations of CDS models and is part of CSN Models (CSNM)

Formatting Conventions

To enable interchangeability, the files are characterized by

  • UTF-8 codepage
  • No byte order mark
  • End-of-line (EOL) character \n
  • Empty line at end-of-file (EOF)

The JSON files additionally follow

  • 2 spaces indentation

We provide an EditorConfig-based formatting configuration file here where the above convention is reflected. A GitHub action runs validations based on this configuration file, to ensure the repository follows the formatting convention. Developers might choose one of the many compatible text editors for the sake of convenience.