Simple transformations in ABAP

ST was created by an SAP declarative language that allows serialization and deserialization between XML formats and ABAP data. Most SAP developers have heard about ST at least once, but only a few have chance to use it in a real project. This is probably due to a lack of working examples on the internet and some additional difficulties described in this chapter. Before using ST, you should take into consideration the following constraints:

• It's only allowed to transform between two formats of ABAP data and XML but not between XML, and XML, or ABAP and ABAP.
• To find a problem in ST, you have to use an ST debugger. This is much more limiting compared with an ABAP debugger.
• You can only transform value-based data, such as fields, structures, or internal tables. You are not able to work with references.

From another point of view, using ST also has a lot of advantages:

• It's a declarative language, but still very simple to use and understand.
• Transformations work both...