ABAP Keyword Documentation → ABAP − Reference → Declarations → Declaration Statements
Data Types and Data Objects
This section describes the declaration of data types and data objects.
Other versions: 7.31 | 7.40 | 7.54
Data Types
Data types are templates for creating data objects. Data types can be defined independently in the ABAP program or in ABAP Dictionary. As attributes of a data object, data types can also exist in a non-independent state. Data types do not use any memory space for work data, but may require memory for administration information.
Data objects
A data object is an instance of a data type and occupies as much memory space as its type specifies.
An ABAP program only works with data that is available as content of data objects. Data objects are either created implicitly as named data objects, or explicitly as
anonymous data objects using CREATE DATA.
Data types of data objects
Data objects can be declared by reference to a non-generic data type of the same ABAP program or from ABAP Dictionary. In this case, the data type determines the complete technical attributes of the data object. A data object can also be constructed in the ABAP program without completely specified type definitions. The data type of a data object of this type is always complete, and does not exist independently, but rather as an attribute of the data object, and is called a bound data type.
Note
The data types of all class attributes belong to the static class properties. A LIKE
addition enables the visible class attributes to be referenced without first creating an object using the class component selector or reference variables