SE21 - what happend to PACKTYPE ?

[joachimrees1]

In an old 701-System, SE21 had this PACKTYPE-option, in a newer 750-System this seems to be missing:

What happened to this concept?

best

Joachim

[Peter_Inotai]

I have seen no official info about it, but it's the same already in 7.40 system.

Peter

[michał_badura]

According to the field PACKTYPE from table TDEVC and to the data element itself, it is now obsolete.

There are yet another concepts, which are or seem to be obsolete right now. For instance, I remember that when I first read more about packages, there were two possibilites: You could flag a package as a server, and / or You could flag it as a client. According to these settings, different checks were executed. Now You have only one option (namely, package is encapsulated).

You can see a reminiscence of that in the above named table: there are fields SRV_CHECK and CLI_CHECK. There is no documentation to the later one, but it says about DCL (dependency control list, as far as I remember). The first one is typed with the data element PAK_ENCAPSULATION_LEVEL; now it's documentation says about three levels (not encapsulated, weakly encapsulated, and encapsulated), although the underlaying domain allows only values space and X.

But there You find also fields like ENCAPSULATION (no data element, description saying about encapsulation level, from 7.10), which has three values in the data base: space, X, and E, or the field DCL_ENABLED, which is typed exactly like CLI_CHECK.

I've found an old screenshot (unfortunatelly only in German) from 7.02 SP06 which I made, I think, after turning the package checks on. In my 7.40 SP11 I don't see this field anymore, even if I turn the package checks on:

Here's the technical info to this hidden field:

I think all the changes took place between 7.00 and 7.40. I mean, as far as I understand the way the system evolved, after 7.00 there were two branches. One was: 7.10, 7.20, and 7.30. Most of the changes were downported to the other branch: 7.01, 7.02, 7.03 and finally 7.31, which is the preceder to 7.40 and 7.50. But not all changes! Enhanced package concept is one of them. According to this abandoned concept, there was a new section for classes (PACKAGE SECTION); as far as I remember, the editor recognized it as a correct statement in one of the systems I worked with (it must had been 7.02 or 7.31), but I'm not able to reproduce it on my 7.40 now. Components in this section were accessible for all other objects in same package. Maybe I'm wrong, but perhaps it was even possible, in this abandoned concept, to have dumps on runtime caused by package violation; but maybe it was only may poor English (i.e. I didn't understand the documentation).

Perhaps there are more hints for this new package concept. Just look at the documentation to the field PACKAGE_KIND (data element PAK_PACKAGE_KIND): it says among others about package format before 7.10 (in my system almost all packages have this kind) and from 7.10 on (in my system there are no such packages); and I think it's not the switch from development class to package what is ment here, but I don't know for sure (am too new to ABAP).

One last thing: there is a data element called PAK_USAGE_OP (usage operations for package object types) with a same called domain underneath. This domain has a value table called PAK_OBJT_UOP. But there is no such table in my system! Neither this, nor any other with a similar name.

Best regards

Michał