Reading SAP tables: I'm using the function module RFC_READ_TABLE in a couple of scripts. This works okay but the parameterization is somewhat tedious. Is there another way to read SAP tables?
There is no general way. For certain tables there are SAP BAPIs that you can use. If you are able to write your own function modules with SE37 you can implement a simple function for each table that you want to read, defining exactly the table key attributes as "import" parameters.