ARTICLE
Methods
Methods are internal procedures of a class
that determine the behavior of an object. They can access all the
attributes of all instances of their class and can therefore change the
status of an object. Methods have a parameter interface, used by the
system to pass values to them when they are called, and by which they
can return values to the caller. The private attributes of a class can
only be changed using methods of the same class.
A method meth is declared in the
declaration section of a class
and is implemented in the
implementation part of the class using the
processing block
METHOD meth.
...
ENDMETHOD.
As in all procedures, local data types and data objects can be
declared in methods. Methods are called
statically using the expression meth( ... ) or
dynamically using the statement
CALL METHOD ( Dynamic Invoke
).
Instance Methods
Instance methods are declared using the METHODS
statement. They can access all the attributes of a class and can
trigger all its events.
Static Methods
Static methods are declared using the
CLASS-METHODS statement. This statement can access
static attributes of a class and is
can trigger static events only.
Constructors
As well as the normal methods that are called
explicitly , there are two special methods called
constructor and class_constructor ,
which are called automatically when an object is created or when a class
component is accessed for the first time.
Functional Methods
Functional methods are methods with precisely one
RETURNING parameter and any number
of other formal parameters. Functional methods cannot just be called as
standalone statements , but also as
functional method calls in
operand positions for functions and
expressions . Here they can be also be combined as
method chainings .
Documentation extract taken from SAP system, � Copyright SAP AG. All rights reserved