SAP ASXML REFERENCE VARIABLE documentation, setup help and example usage

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asXML - Named Reference Variables
A named reference variable is represented as the only attribute of the associated subelement of values , with the subelement not having any further content.
bni href="#key"/
An attribute for a reference variable has the name href and the content "#key", where key is the unique key of an object in the element heap . An element of an initial reference does not have an attribute href and has no other content. The key key of the ABAP runtime environment is set in serializations; in deserializations, any key can be used.
Note the following special cases when serializing named reference variables:

Data reference variables that point to data objects whose data type only has one technical name raise the exception

CX_XSLT_SERIALIZATION_ERROR , which can be avoided by the entering transformation option
technical_types .

Data reference variables that point to data objects not created using CREATE DATA ( stack references) are handled like initial reference variables by default during serialization. This can be overridden by specifying the transformation option data_refs .

During deserialization to a reference variable, the reference variable must be the same as or more general than the dynamic type of the object that is stored in the XML document. The associated ABAP data objects or instances of a class are created during deserialization.

Example
See Serializing Data References .