Earlier today I was doing a QC review to a new program named ZSDFAKSPE with almost 1000 lines and no comment whatsoever. An obvious clone of a standard program called SDFAKSPE.

So I decided to use the Spli-screen editor, found in transaction SE39. Having entered both programs I could then compare them side-by-side.

Being used to develop in Java and C++, the way transaction SE24 forces you to navigate between each of its parts and the fact that every method has its own include was very confusing to me when I first started using it. Why does SAP always have to make things so complicated? I eventually got used to it. At some point in time SE24 introduced the option source-code based which shows the class and all its methods in a single text.

Imagine that you’re editing one of those ancient programs with thousands of lines (yes because today you know that it’s wrong not to modularize (it’s a sin really) your methods (yes because today you always use methods) don’t have more than 200 lines).

You you call a function via RFC you need to provide the RFC DESTINATION for the remote system:

CALL FUNCTION ‘ZSNEEZED’
  DESTINATION ’sistema_longe_daqui’.

What if, for some reason, the function running in the remote system needs to call a function in the original system? How would you do it?

Although a substantial part of an ABAP programmer time is spent debugging code, most programmers I know don’t invest much in getting to know the ABAP debugger. Maybe because they spent too many years working with its previous version which was truly archaic and worthless. But the new one can do much more than you usually ask of it. And Abapinho intends to teach you how.

Today I’ll teach you just a simple key.

When you debug you use F5 key to move to the next statement (or go inside a sub-routine). But imagine an IF with multiple conditions:

IF A = 1 AND B = 2 AND C = 3.
  WRITE 'I like the word glauc'.
ENDIF.

When you debug through that IF using F5 and one of the expressions is false you’ll step out of the IF without knowing which of the three was false.

But the new debugger has a new very neat functionality which can help you to better understand what happened there.

Every once in a while I find yet another hidden SAP virtue. I just found out that there is a transaction which, for a given word in a given language, will help you translate it to another language by showing you which other translations already exist for that same word. How cool is that? Ok, it’s not Google Translate, but it’s a nice help. Oh, I almost forgot. The transaction is called STERM.

Sometimes ABAP SQL doesn’t allow you to do something you’d be able to do using the database’s native SQL. It can still be done.

You just found a bug in a standard FORM (or FM or METHDO): FORM EQUAL_VALUE CHANGING W_DATE TYPE SYDATUM. W_DATE = SY-DATUM - 1. ENDFORM. You report the error to SAP but you know it will take them several days, weeks or months to publish a correction. And you need it corrected right now. You decide to act. So you use the implicit enhancement at the start of the FORM to replace the standard code with your own (just until the correction arrives, of course):

SapGUI usually keeps a history of the last values entered on each field. This is usually a good thing. But you may very well not want it to happen (in case you’re entering pornographic values in a specific field for example). You could always turn it off globally in the SapGUI settings.

But what if you just want to disable it in one particular field? Abapinho tells you how to do it.

We are all aware of SAP implicit enhancements which allow you to add code to the top or bottom of any block of standard code (methods, functions, etc). We’ve all used it to make a change to a BAPI or other standard piece of code.

But only recently did I find that you can also use these implicit enhancements to add parameters to standard methods and functions.

Toad is a very famous SQL tool which allows you to build and execute SQL queries in an easy and interactive way. And now, thanks to Mr. Sébastien HERMANN, SAP has a simplified version of this wonderful tool. I’ll let him explain. Thank you Sérgio Fraga for spotting this. Greetings from Abapinho.

One of the few things that separates us humans from all the other animals is our ability to think about thoughts.

A sparrow may think I’m scared, I’ll say chirp chirp chirp and, as a direct consequence, whoever stands close to it will hear chirp chirp chirp.

The “where used” tool is very dear to any ABAP developer. Through it one can find out where a given object is used. Doesn’t look like much but we all know how important this is.

Class CL_GUI_FRONTEND_SERVICES is commonly used to upload and download files from and to the user’s local computer. But it can do many more good things. For example: