When a program or screen is executed, the ABAP Interpreter and the screen interpreter access the type definitions stored in the ABAP Dictionary.

The ABAP tools and the Screen Painter use the information stored in the ABAP Dictionary to support you during program development. An example of this is the Get from Dictionary button in the Screen Painter, which you can use to place fields of a table or structure defined in the ABAP Dictionary on a screen.

The database interface uses the information about tables or database views stored in the ABAP Dictionary to access the data of these objects.