I don’t.

And I don’t want to. Why waste memory on stuff like that?

And I don’t need to because ABAP has a class just for that.

Someone asks you to select records based on a criteria for which you’ll have a small set of known values which you’re told will never change. Did you know you can do it directly in the SELECT?

And that’s it really. That’s the whole tip right there at the title. This has always been right under your nose but you probably never thought about it: you can save variants in SE16N. And they can even be user-specific. So useful and so little known. Thank you Sérgio Fraga for the tip. Thank you Cloudtail for the photo. Greetings from Abapinho.

You’ve developed a report which you know will take over 12 hours to run. So you don’t want anyone to try to run it in foreground. I’ll show you a way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Pipes are the new trend when it comes to manipulating strings:

str = |Hi { sy-uname }, | &
      |today's date is { sy-datum }.|.

Besides looking cool, it’s way more practical than using the dreaded CONCATENATE.

But I only recently found out that you can directly apply formatting to the variables:

To check if a program is running in background usually one takes a peek at SY-BATCH. SY-BINPT can also be used to check if the background program is a BDC session. You usually check one of these.

There is a similar but not exactly equal question, though. How do you ask if the GUI is available? Most times both questions will have the same answer. But not always.

It’s like saying the Sun can be seen during the day while the Moon can be seen during the night. If the sky is cloudy you won’t be seeing them.

Usually SAP systems have a predefined time limit for running a program interactively. If the program takes longer to run than that you’ll get a runtime execution error. A dump.

You may not even know how to program but if you’re able to type fast and know enough keyboard shortcuts everyone will think you’re an expert. In the ABAP editor write the following word: subdermatoglyphic Now try the following shortcuts: CTRL+U: SUBDERMATOGLYPHIC BIG LETTERS! UPPER CASE! CTRL+L: subdermatoglyphic small letters! lower case! CTRL+J: Subdermatoglyphic The First Letter Of Each Word In Upper case! CTRL+K: sUBDERMATOGLYPHIC tHe BiG aRe NoW sMaLl AnD tHe SmAlL ArE nOw BiG!

A long time ago transaction SE17 was used to look at database tables content. They quickly felt ashamed and decided to improve it, creating SE16. When ALV was invented, SE16N was released (although until today many people still use SE16, go figure!).

Today I present you SE16H.

If you want to serialize a set of strings stored in an internal table there are two ways to do it. One is dull, the other one is full of style.

What I’m about to show you is not exactly new. It has even been used in Abapinho before. But since there is still a lot of people out there using LOOP to change a single field of an internal table, I thought it would be worth talking about it.

Pré 7.4: DATA l_idade type i. READ TABLE lt_folk INTO ls_folk WITH KEY name = l_name. l_age = ls_folk-age. Pós 7.4: data(l_age) = lt_folk[ name = l_name ]-age ) Thanks Sérgio Fraga for the tip. Greeetings from Abapinho.

Abapinho will slowly start posting tips specific to AS ABAP 7.4. Slowly because there are still only a few people with access to this version. But there are so many new things to tell that I feel tempted to start posting all of them. ABAP was a flabby middle aged guy with a beer belly. It underwent major plastic surgery and now looks like a lean 20 year old kid who can party until 9am, drink 7 gin tonics and then, before going to bed, do 100 burpees just to sleep better.

You’re in the middle of a debug and want it to stop at a specific message.

What to do?

If you are one of those persons who still uses SE16, this article is not for you. If you keep reading, you might find yet another reason to finally start using SE16N (as if all others were not enough already).

Imagine that you want to select all materials whose name contains “PREGO” and whose type is “FERRAGENS”, and all materials whose name contains “GUARDANAPO” and whose type is “COMIDA”. In other words, “PREGO_NO_PAO” or “GUARDANAPO_PAPEL” won’t be part of the result set. What you want is this:

(MATNR = “PREGO%” AND MTART = “FERR” ) OR (MATNR = “GUARDANAPO%” AND MAKT = “COMI” )

As you know, using SE16N in a regular way (which doesn’t use what I’m about to show you) you would need to execute it twice and manually compare data, because the selection screen does not allow you to make multiple OR selections.

Or does it?