What's a boxed component?

I read about them first in this document - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-26231. Then I read the release notes - you do read the release notes when you upgrade to a new abap version, don't you? It's worth doing, as you can find some very nice language enhancements. I read the sap help, but couldn't quite get what the point of them was, nor how they worked.

Then I read this excellent blog SAP ABAP TYPE BOXED, New Type Category 7.02 Ehp2 - ABAP Help Blog that explains their functionality very clearly, but just now, I've created my first, real world use of the concept. So I'll share it.

Buffering data

I've got some master data - materials and time dependent attributes. I've got a few million records of data that contain materials and dates, and I want to find the attributes for those material, at that particular date. The records I've got are in no particular order, may refer to the same material many times, and may well have materials that don't have any master data. Also, the materials in my records are only a subset of all the possible materials.

Got that? Good.

The volume of master data is such that I cannot read all the data into an internal table in one go. So what I do is maintain a buffer that starts off empty. For a given material, I first check the buffer. If it isn't there, I check the database. If I still don't find anything I create a record in the buffer with a flag "not found", If I do find something, then I add it to the buffer.

Memory

So, my line structure is something like: MATERIAL, CORRECTED_COST, CORRECT_CURRENCY, NOT_FOUND. Here's some ABAP:

TYPES: BEGIN OF corrected_cost_ty,                    MATERIAL,                    CORRECTED_COST,                    CORRECTED_CURRENCY,                    NOT_FOUND,               END OF corrected_cost_ty

Now, the problem is that if a material is NOT_FOUND, then it has no correct cost. So for all the NOT_FOUND data, there's these two fields which never contain anything, but will be taking up space, nonetheless. This is where boxing comes in.

I create a type "attributes" which has CORRECTED_COST and CORRECT_CURRENCY, then I redo my corrected_cost_ty like this.

TYPES: BEGIN OF attributes_ty,        CORRECTED_COST,         CORRECTED_CURRENCY,      END OF attributes_ty.

TYPES: BEGIN OF corrected_cost_ty,
         MATERIAL,         ATTRIBUTES type attributes_ty BOXED,         NOT_FOUND,       END OF corrected_cost_ty

Now, when I don't have any attributes for a material (because it's NOT_FOUND), memory is only allocated to the MATERIAL and NOT_FOUND.

The only downside is that I have to refer to my attributes as attributes-corrected_cost.  I'd like to be able to use something like

INCLUDE TYPE attributes_ty BOXED.

But I guess we'll have to wait a while for that to happen.