ABAP DESCRIBE Statement syntax, information and example SAP source code

DESCRIBE

ABAP Syntax:
Field Properties

1 DESCRIBE FIELD ...

Properties of an Internal Table

2 DESCRIBE TABLE ...

Distance Between Two Fields

3 DESCRIBE DISTANCE ...

What does it do? You can use the variants of the statement DESCRIBE
listed above to specify some of the properties that have data objects at runtime.
Latest notes: The statement DESCRIBE is used to determine the properties of data objects of elementary data types. When DESCRIBE
is used for structures or data objects of deep
data types like strings, internal tables, or reference variables, you can only determine elementary properties. Additional information, for example, the static or dynamic type of a reference variable cannot be determined by DESCRIBE . For this kind of information, use the type description classes of
Run Time Type Services ( RTTS ). These enable you to determine all data object properties of all data types. Since the functions of the RTTS type description classes comprise the complete functions of the DESCRIBE statement, the system classes can be used instead of the statement.
The variant DESCRIBE LIST specifies the properties of lists in the list buffer.

Documentation extract taken from SAP system, � Copyright SAP AG. All rights reserved