SAP R/3 repository is a wonderful thing. A vast warehouse of data elements, structures, tables and much more, readily available to one and all. As developers, it is extremely convenient to quickly pick these elements and pull them into our programs as necessity conveys, while our string of thought remains virtually uninterrupted. Well, not all is sunshine and roses. If you are not careful with the mushrooms you pick you might get a poisoned one.

If you look up the UNAME system variable in debug within a RFC call you may think it kind of odd to find a username that is not your own. What happens is that the system adopts a specific username for remote calls and a new session is started. A new session implies a new execution context and, hence, all our strategically placed breakpoints will no longer be recognised.

This problem can hinder a simple debug forcing us to run through the code looking for THAT remote call to THAT particular system.

SAP has a solution.

When a development is completed in SAP, the time to send it to other systems where it can be duly tested and then executed by users has finally arrived. Before that occurs, however, it has to be checked for lapses, errors and other problems that could lead to our programmes behaving in an unpredictable manner. There is a very useful tool that allows some of these errors and gaps to be filtered out. It is called ABAP Code Inspector.

Do you know the difference between a mystery and an enigma puzzle? An enigma puzzle is known to have a solution, but with a mystery you don’t know if there is solution.

Do you agree with this? 5 * 3 / 10 = ( 5 * 3 ) / 10 = 5 * ( 3 / 10 ) = 1.5

If you don’t, you should agree because it is a mathematical fact.

Now let’s do some experiments.

A friend of a friend of a friend said that a friend of his knew a friend who explained to him in a shady club bar in the docks area of Lisbon how to steal data from a SALV.

Regularly expressions have been around for ages. But they’re not very well known and even less used. They are a sort of descriptive language that allows for making research and very sophisticated replacements in alpha-numeric chains.

A simple example: to validate an email address. If you have to do this through an algorithm you’ll have to work hard. However, with regular expressions, only two or three code lines and the regular expression "\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b" are enough.

This is a 2-in-1 article. That is to say, you’ll learn two subjects at once.

But get ready, what you’ll learn is dynamite, and, in the wrong hands, it can implode your universe.

First, you’ll learn how to read content on the web. And right after that, assuming that this content is ABAP code, you’ll learn how to execute it in the blink of an eye.

I have already advised here that, in tables with many fields, it’s always recommended to avoid using SELECT *, you must always select, explicitly, only the necessary fields.

But I didn’t warn you that there’s yet another optimisation worth making: avoid INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF TABLE.

You’ve screwed up the productive system. You made a change to a method of a class (or to a function, whatever). Someone else makes another change to another method of the same class (or to another function of the same group of functions, whatever) and saves it to a different transport. When you transport your changes to the productive system, you discover that the class (or function, whatever) now has a syntax error because the changes had interdependencies. You also discover that now, until you get this problem resolved, all your functional co-workers hate you.

SAPlink is a Z program that is installed in the development environment and which enables a wide variety of object types to be imported and exported from the Workbench.

Take a look here at some examples of how SAPlink can be used:

• To transfer a table from one SAP system to another

• To share a class on the internet

• To make a local security backup of a set of programs before making a dangerous change

• To keep a development in our personal repository (in Evernote, of course) in case you need it later in another project

• Etc.