Efficient serialization of generically-typed structure

former_member186608 — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 08:19:24 GMT

Hi people,

in my code I am dealing with a structure of a generic type, that means at design time I have no information about its particular components and their actual values. My aim is to serialize this structure into a string as fast as possible. All values of the components shall be separated by a certain delimiter. The kind of delimiter and the drawbacks of using delimiters in general shall not be discussed here.

My approach looks as follows:

The field symbol <ls_untyped_data> points to the generically-typed structure. lv_number_of_fields says how many components the structure has.

I use the approach of targeting to the component by its index, since this is faster according to the ABAP documentation than referring to the component name. If lv_counter equals 1, we are in the first loop cycle and simply add the value of the first component. If lv_Counter is > 1, we additionally add the field_separator.

lv_counter = 0.

DO lv_number_of_fields TIMES.

ADD 1 TO lv_counter.

ASSIGN COMPONENT lv_counter OF STRUCTURE <ls_untyped_data> TO <lv_field_value>.

IF lv_counter > 1.

mv_serialized_records = mv_serialized_records && lv_field_separator && <lv_field_value>.

ELSEIF lv_counter = 1.

mv_serialized_records = mv_serialized_records && <lv_field_value>.

ENDIF.

ENDDO.

This solution works as expected. However, when we deal with a large number of components (in a particular case I have more than 300) and we deal with a huge amount of structures (that means the entire coding above is called several times for a set of structures), this approach is considerably slow.

I suspect the reason is the dynamic lookup of the component at runtime. However, I am not aware of any other possibiltiy to dynamically inspect the structure.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Marco

Re: Efficient serialization of generically-typed structure

Former Member — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 08:57:40 GMT

Hi Marco,

As an alternative you could try to run the transformation id on the structure in order to convert the structure to an XML string and then run a Simple or XSLT transformation in order to replace the XML tags with the custom delimiter (or do this second step with a normal search and replace).

The upside of this approach would be that you don't need any dynamic lookup of the input's structure.

I cannot state anything about the performance of this approach but you could give it a try and compare this to the approach you already have.

Regards,

Valentin

topic Re: Efficient serialization of generically-typed structure in Application Development and Automation Discussions

Efficient serialization of generically-typed structure

Re: Efficient serialization of generically-typed structure