SAP ABAP Business Add-Ins - SAP ABAP

What is business add-ins?What is its function?

In certain cases, though there are many Microsoft Excel add-ins are available for the user to improve functionality of different applications; some special functions need to be predefined in a software application. So SAP acquires some predefined functions called Business Add-Ins popularly known as BADIs.

A BADI is an enhancement technique that helps the SAP programmer or a user to facilitate by adding some additional code to the program which already exists in SAP system. SAP system can be improved by using certain techniques i.e standard or customized logic system. First of all to enhance SAP application the user has to define a BADI and later it is implemented. While defining a BADI, an interface is created. This is implemented by this interface, which in turn is implemented by one or more adaptor classes.

The BADI technique is different from other enhancement techniques in two ways −

• Enhancement technique can be implemented only once.
• This enhancement technique can be used by many customers simultaneously.

Creation of filter BADIs is possible as this is not possible with the enhancement techniques. The concept of BADIs has been redefined in SAP Release 7.0 with the following goals −

• Enhancing the standard applications in a SAP system by adding two new elements in the ABAP language, that is ‘GET BADI’ and ‘CALL BADI’.
• Offering more flexibility features such as contexts and filters for the enhancement of standard applications in a SAP system.

When a BADI is created by the use, it also has an interface and other additional components, such as function codes for menu enhancements and screen enhancements. This allows customers to include their own enhancements in the standard SAP application which are located in an appropriate application development namespace.

Therefore, a BADI can be figured as an enhancement technique with the usage of ABAP objects to create ‘predefined points’ in the SAP components. These predefined points are then implemented by individual industry solutions, country variants, partners and customers to suit their specific requirements. SAP actually introduced the BADI enhancement technique with the Release 4.6A, and the technique has been re-implemented again in the Release 7.0.