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RTTI Class Hierarchy

Audio Transcript
As of SAP Web AS 6.10, ABAP developers use a class-based concept, RTTI, to
determine type properties, such as data types and object types, at runtime.
Before RTTI, ABAP contained only the DESCRIBE FIELD and DESCRIBE TABLE
statements. However, these statements are limited to properties of data objects,
and do not determine as many properties as RTTI.
RTTI consists of a hierarchy of ten global classes that developers use.
The description of a type at runtime is an instance of one of these global classes.
The instance attributes save the properties of the type. You query them directly or
by using appropriate methods. At runtime, only one description object exists for
each type.
All classes inherit properties from a shared superclass, either directly or indirectly,
and their names all follow the pattern CL_ABAP_xxxDESCR, where xxx stands for
the category of the type used to describe the respective class.
You need different classes because the attributes and methods of each class
specialize to describe a specific category of types. For example, you use class
CL_ABAP_TABLEDESCR to describe table types. Therefore, the class contains
attributes for the table category and the structure of the table key, among other
information. These attributes are specific to class CL_ABAP_TABLEDESCR. No
other RTTI classes contain them.

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