SELECT-OPTIONS concept in programming languages

Question

For those who know how a selection screen/select options works in SAP system:

Does anybody knows any open source project/product with the same functionality for different programming languages, specially for ones with web support?

I would like to create an advanced and dynamic search screen based on a set of database tables/view.

Answer 1

I'm not aware that such project exists, but the screen part won't get you very far. Beside the very convenient entry of selection values the main feature of select-option is, that you can pass them to ABAPs build in Open SQL like

select ....
where field in selopt
.....

In other programming environment this is not supported, as such built in language construct is not available. I.e. on a web project if you have MySQL or some other DBMS storing your data, you'd have to get the values from the select-option from you screen and translate them to native SQL.

The screen part should be relatively easy to implement i.e. with jquery ui or some other GUI toolkit for webapplications, the hard thing will be the transaltion to native SQL.

This gets even worse considering, that in ABAP reports, Open SQL statements are used on a very high level, where in other programming environments you usually use a lot more layers of abstraction for your database access.