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?

DELETE CLEAR REFRESH FREE

These are different ways of deleting all data from an internal table. They look the same. But they aren’t.

Get ready because you’ll soon be running into a lot of surprises. ABAP is learning new tricks. Look at this one: CONSTANTS: lc_menina TYPE STRING VALUE ‘GIRL', lc_menino TYPE STRING VALUE ‘BOY’, lc_senhor TYPE STRING VALUE ’GENTLEMAN’, lc_senhora TYPE STRING VALUE ‘LADY’. SELECT nome, CASE WHEN sexo_id = ‘M' AND idade < 18 THEN @lc_menino WHEN sexo_id = ‘F’ AND idade < 18 THEN @lc_menina WHEN sexo_id = ‘M' AND idade >=18 THEN @lc_senhor WHEN sexo_id = ‘F’ AND idade >=18 THEN @lc_senhora END AS titulo FROM zpessoa WHERE pessoa_id = @pessoa_id INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF @lt_pessoas.

Google Chrome has an app for searching SAP notes. It’s called SAP Notes finder. You can install it here. Thank you Fernanda Mirabile and Talita Polanczyk for the tip. Greetings from Abapinho.

Reports still writing directly to the screen are very hard to maintain whenever changes to the layout are required. On such occasions, review the code and, if the effort involved is not too big, consider converting it to ALV. Always involve the functional people in this decision.

[:pt]O Pedro Lima (responsável pelo OnSAP) fez um curso online grátis a ensinar os rudimentos da depuração em ABAP. Espreitem pois está bem feito e porque estas iniciativas merecem todo o nosso apoio. Tenho a certeza de que o Pedro fará mais cursos se vir que há público interessado. Aqui Nota: o curso é em inglês. O Abapinho saúda-vos [:]

Sadly, Abapinho will not be able to continue posting the English translation of the Portuguese posts. I am sorry to all the readers who don’t speak Portuguese. Abapinho’s main goal has always been to publish ABAP content written in Portuguese. But the possibility of also publishing them in English was a great asset because it allowed us to reach a much wider audience. We were able to do it for several years because the translations were sponsored.

[:pt]Sabias que quando invocas uma função com a opção DESTINATION ‘NONE’ estás a iniciar uma nova LUW? Isto pode parecer apenas uma curiosidade, mas há um caso em que pode fazer toda a diferença: sabes aqueles módulos de função que ao serem chamados uma segunda vez têm um comportamento diferente da primeira vez? Isto acontece porque eles hão-de ter alterado alguma variável global ao grupo de funções. Ora se iniciares uma nova LUW quando chamares a função, o seu grupo de funções é automaticamente inicializado e assim garantes que o comportamento da função é o esperado.

[:pt]Para fazeres debug a um programa que faça parte de um job faz o seguinte:

If you’re still not using exception classes, then you’re making a mistake. Cause they are very healthy for your code. They’re not only good nutrients for the system, they also make it lean and less vulnerable to diseases.

There are cases where you still need to deal with the old exceptions. For example, when a function module is invoked.

In this article I am presenting a suggestion that seems a little complex, but it works very well if you need to integrate the old exceptions with exception class in a simple way. And though it is sophisticated, you only need to do it once. Once it’s done, it’s easy to use.

[:pt]O Flávio Pagoti, do blog ABAP101 publicou um livro em português sobre SAPUI5/OPENUI5. Aqui está o artigo do ABAP101 a anunciar o livro. Lá encontras um link para o comprar. Custa $9,99. A minha principal motivação quando decidi criar o Abapinho foi exactamente combater a gritante falta de conteúdos técnicos de qualidade escritos em português. Hoje as coisas estão um pouco melhores, em particular no mundo do ABAP onde há vários blogs de óptima qualidade.

What can be done when a night is not enough to complete the daily processes?

Historically ABAP programs tend to grow very loooong. All programming best practices teach us there is not a single advantage in this approach. If any routine, be it a program, a method, a function or anything else, becomes longer than 200-300 lines, question it and seriously consider refactoring it into several sub-routines. This has the added advantage of potentially increasing code reuse. But the greatest advantage is encapsulation, isolating variables in their local context, instead of having all of them together, resulting in safer and more readable code.