Sometimes a SALV has inconsistencies which can go unnoticed. For example, if its structure has an amount field which doesn’t have an associated currency field:

Once again SAPGui surprises me with yet another obscure shortcut I didn’t know about. Let’s use the customer display transaction XD03 as an example: Go into the transaction’s selection screen with /NXD03 Fill in the customer number an press ENTER to display its details Do whatever it is you want to do there and get out of it Suddenly… you remember that you needed to do something else there

In my current customer, I have three development systems. There used to be only one. And that’s where I customized and fine tuned the Code Inspector_ variant I use to run Abap Test Cockpit. When the other two appeared, before manually copying the variant into them, I decided to investigate a little bit. Much to my surprise, I found in GitHun project upDOWNci which does exactly what I needed: export and import Code Inspector Now, copying the variant was a piece of cake.

If in your report called APP1 you need to save a file in a server folder (ex.: /export/app1/) and you don’t want it to be a selection screen parameter, how do you do it?

You’re in the editor. You type ( or [ or { or ' and SAP is dumb and doesn’t close it right away like a proper IDE would. Well, Click on the lower right corner icon which gives you access to the SAPGui options where you configure code templates. In the formatting option, activate Enable Auto Brackets and voilá, SAP will now automatically close any doors you open. I don’t see why this isn’t set by default.

If you read Abapinho you already know how much I like exception classes. But this is not the only ABAP mechanism for dealing with errors.

There is another one, called ASSERT, which should be used more often.

The other day I was trying (and failing) to modify a line of a SORTED TABLE.

The other day a very strange thing happened to me. I was sending SY-TABIX as a parameter into a method. Before the call it contained 1 but, once inside, the parameter’s value was 0. Weird. o_thingalizer->very_strange_thing(sy-tabix). I was hearing “Why?! Why?!” repeatedly inside my head. But suddenly I understood it! When you send some field of the SYST as a by parameter you have to pass it by value and not by reference.

Some time ago I wrote an article explaining a way to automatically convert classic exceptions to exception classes. Today I use this technique in almost all the exception classes that I create (and I’ve even improved it, but I’ll leave that for another post).

This tip explains the exact opposite.

Sometimes, when comparing versions, several differences show up even when we did not make changes to the code. These differences may simply be a consequence of a Pretty Printer that altered code indentations. This makes comparing the versions confusing. But ABAP Workbench lets you configure the diff tool to ignore indentations and even comments. Just press F5 while there or go to the “Display Format> Settings” menu and adapt it to your needs:

When you want to use CL_GUI_ALV_GRID in a CONTAINER you must copy a standard Status GUI from another program. For example, the GUI Status “STANDARD” of the function group SALV. And then, in the screen’s PAI you do:

SET PF-STATUS ‘STANDARD’.

And thus the little standard buttons show up on your screen.

While coding, it’s always good to have ways to speed up what we’re doing. A good one is automatic generation of templates for function and method calls.

I know 3 ways to achieve this.

Today when I want to create a SALV I always create a DDIC structure with the data elements already set to show the texts I need. This avoids the need for code to manipulate the field catalog.

The ABAP editor is full of functionalities yet to be discovered.

When I do CTRL-F to search for text, the option I usually choose is “Find next”.

During all my ABAPian life I was convinced that APPEND STRUCTURES had one single purpose: to add new extra fields to an existing standard table.

But I recently learned that they let you do two more things after all: