Preface – This post is part of the ABAP Beginner series.

Introduction

The flow of the processing of the Smart Form can be controlled using the tree hierarchy defined in the navigation window. In this article we will explain the flow control in SAP SmartForms.

Conditions affecting Flow Control

There are multiple options that affect the sequence of the processing of the form.

Output Conditions:

This is used to suppress the processing of individual nodes or entire subtrees in the tree structure.

• To enter the output condition, select the node and go to the Condition tab in the maintenance window.
• In this tab, a condition can be entered with two operands in each line. An operand can be a value or a field. To select a comparison operator, press on the pushbutton between the two columns. The most important operators are AND and OR. By default, the conditions are evaluated using AND
• Perform local check to validate output conditions.
• The output conditions can be linked to output events of pages and windows. Using AND condition in Additional event box is used to link them.

When the conditions are met, the system processes the nodes/sub-nodes according to the condition value. If not, the system ignores the current node and its sub-nodes.

Alternative Execution:

It is used to process one of two inferior nodes. To do so,

• Create a Alternative node in the navigation tree.
• On the General Attributes tab, define an unstructured condition in the Node Conditions
• This node has two directly inferior nodes: TRUE and FALSE. Insert the inferior nodes here.
• Perform local check to validate output conditions.

If the condition is met, the system processes the directly inferior node TRUE, if not, FALSE.

Repeated Output:

To process the output repeatedly, loop nodes are used which reads the data from the internal table line by line. To do so,

• Create a Loop node in the navigation tree.
• Enter a unique name and description for the node.
• Read the data from an internal table to a work area and create inferior nodes that display the fields of the read table lines.

Dynamic Processing:

This is done by page sequence and numbering. This is determined by

• The Next page attribute
• The volume of the data and space available in the main window
• As soon as a page is full, the Smart Form triggers a page break, known as a dynamic page break.

During the processing of the form, the system maintains internal counters, which can be used to display the current page number.