Screen Painter & Controls

Screen painter is a tool in ABAP dev workbench used to create the screens using the

T-code SE51. In the screen painter, you can drag & drop SAP controls on the screens.

Controls are independent binary software components that are installed on a local PC (the presentation server). When you install a local SAP GUI on your machine, the system also installs the appropriate controls.Typical examples of Controls Technology controls are:

- Picture controls, which allow you to display any picture (.BMP, .JPG, or .GIF format) on the SAP R/3 screen

- Tree controls, which are used to display and work with a tree structure

- Text-edit controls, which allow you to implement editors for viewing and maintaining texts

- HTML viewer controls, which allow you to display HTML pages and graphics in your transactions

- Custom Control:

A custom control is an area on a screen. You use custom controls to embed controls (for example, ALV grid). Use CL_GUI_CUSTOM_CONTAINER to working with custom control via coding.

- Docking Control:

As well as using custom containers, you can link controls to a screen using a SAP Docking Container. This is encapsulated in the global class CL_GUI_DOCKING_CONTAINER. The SAP Docking Container does not place the control within a screen. Instead, it attaches it to one of the four edges.
Custom control/Docking control is usually used as parent container to other controlers (e.g. Splitter, ALV Grid).

The SAP Control Framework

The controls on the presentation server (SAP GUI) and the ABAP application programs on the application server communicate using the SAP Control Framework. It contains global classes that can be found in the class library under Basis ® Frontend Services. These classes encapsulate the communication between the application server and presentation server, which is implemented using Remote Function Call.

Programs that use controls on a screen work with the methods and events of the global classes that encapsulates them.