Category > Tips & tricks
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Does the function exist?

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You call a function. Imagine it doesn’t answer. It may be that it’s staying silent. Or it’s shy. Or dumb. Or, of all the misfortunes, it doesn’t exist.

To make sure and put your mind to rest you then do:

Writing money without any decimal worries

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Some people read the TCURX to find out the number of decimal places of a CURRENCY when they need to write a money field to an alphanumeric variable.

Are you one of those people? Don’t be.

Finally, expressions can be concatenated

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Finally, the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2 makes ABAP start to seem like a normal programming language.

It even allows expressions to be concatenated, no less!

Decimal to alphanumeric without depending on the user

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When reading a file with numeric values to an internal table or vice versa, the success of the conversion depends on whether the user has defined the dot or comma as the decimal separator. It is customary to then go and read the user setting and then adjust the values from the file with a dot or a comma as required.

But this is unfortunate and rather inelegant. There should be a way of not making this depend on the user.

And there is.

SORTED instead of STANDARD in the cache tables

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Some time ago I wrote a post here showing the advantages of using internal tables with defined indexes instead of simple STANDARD tables. Confession: that habit is so ingrained that since then, almost all the internal tables I have created have continued to be STANDARD TABLE. It’s very common to create internal tables to cache data that I know I’ll often use inside LOOPS to avoid having to SELECT SINGLES inside them.

Share constants among several classes

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Imagine you have a herd of related classes sharing between them a whole bunch of constants. Saying the same thing a different way, would you like all the classes of the herd to have easy access to the bunch of constants?

(If you’re confused, then let me tell you that the “herd” thing was just to baffle you)

Carrying on…..

SAP for rent

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If you really need to access an SAP and nobody lets you, and you don’t have a computer where you can install it or you don’t have enough know-how or patience to do it, you can always rent.

Colour hallucination

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This is not really an article. It’s hardly a tip. It’s closer to getting something off my chest in all the colours of the rainbow.

Create RANGEs in DDIC without getting all wound up

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I am using RANGEs more and more. I use them at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and outside meal times. It’s like soy sauce. A few spoonfuls and everything is instantly tastier.

Lock data in Z-tables without a locking object

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If I needed to create locking entries in a ZCOISO table I had created, up to two days ago I would have gone to SE11 to create a locking object for the ZCOISO table so that I could then use the function module generated by the locking object to lock the data.

But not anymore.

SAP system name in the window title

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The client where I’m working at the moment owns more SAP systems than the number of volcanoes in Chile. And, of course, it’s inevitable to have multiple sessions open for several of those systems. With the windows minimized it’s impossible to know the matching between systems and sessions. I mean, it was impossible, because today that’s already possible:

Execute commands in the user’s computer

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It’s been a while since Abapinho played with fire. Today he will. Because today he’ll show you how to execute DOS commands on the user’s local machine. After you finish reading this article, you’ll be ready to format the hard disks of all your users. Dealing with danger helps make us aware of the power we have and the responsibility that comes with it. Dear reader, listen to your conscience.

Benefits of LIKE LINE OF

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Let’s start by assuming that you have some dignity and so you don’t use internal tables with HEADER LINE anymore ;)

Given this, let’s suppose you declare an internal table:

Maintaining table maintenance authorisation groups

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There are some projects in which the authorisations group associated with table maintenance is always &NC;&, that is, Not Classified. It signals that everything there is friendly and nobody is hurting anyone else. But there are other projects where authorisation groups are taken seriously. But this is not synonymous with saying that they are organised. Serious or not, usually it all ends in a big mess, with nobody knowing who is authorised to do what.

This tip may help.

INSERT and APPEND with ASSIGNING FIELD-SYMBOL

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The harsh truth, at all costs, is that structures are out of date. Nowadays FIELD-SYMBOLS are in.

When you make a LOOP to an internal table of course that you also use ASSIGNING FIELD-SYMBOL instead of INTO Structure,correct?

But what was screwing everything over was APPEND and INSERT. I did not know how to use a structure to add records