Table Types

Table types are construction blueprints for internal tables that are stored in the ABAP Dictionary. When you create a table type in the ABAP Dictionary, you specify the line type, access type, and key. The line type can be any data type from the ABAP Dictionary, that is, a data element, a structure, a table type, or the type of a database table. You can also enter a predefined Dictionary type directly as the line type, in the same way that you can with a domain.

In an ABAP program, you can use the TYPE addition to refer directly to a table type. If you define a local data type in a program by referring to a table type as follows:
TYPES dtype TYPE table.

The construction blueprint of the table type is used to create a local internal table dtype in the program. The predefined Dictionary data types of the domains used by the data elements in the structure are converted into the corresponding ABAP types. The semantic attributes of the data elements are used for the corresponding components of the internal table in the program.