Here we are again facing a dilemma: hide something because it is dangerous and someone can do bad things using this information or teach it because it would be condescending to presume the readers are not responsible enough to know it. Dictatorships usually go for the first: burning books, censorship, etc. Abapinho like to believe that its readers are responsible people and deserve the right to know.
Thus, here it is. No, it’s not a user manual on how to enrich uranium nor a formula for homemade nitroglycerin. But it’s something similar: a trick that allows you to change standard objects without the need for a key.
By default SE16N always shows the values in the external format, applying the conversion exit to all of them. Until recently, I used to go the ancient SE17 whenever I needed to see them in their internal format. But Rui Nunes told me how to do it in SE16N.
Here’s a not very orthodox wat to deal with a report’s selection screen.
Sometimes you may need to have a special parameter which you prefer to hide from normal users but still need access to. Example: a flag to activate a debug/trace mode. I’ll show you how you can do this by just typing the magic word, ABRACADABRA.
It goes like this:
DATA: unhide_parameters TYPE flag.
PARAMETERS: p_debug AS CHECKBOX.
AT SELECTION-SCREEN.
CASE sy-ucomm.
WHEN 'ABRACADABRA'.
unhide_parameters = abap_true.
WHEN 'NORMAL'.
CLEAR unhide_parameters.
ENDCASE.
AT SELECTION-SCREEN OUTPUT.
LOOP AT SCREEN.
IF screen-name = 'P_DEBUG' AND unhide_parameters IS INITIAL.
screen-active = 0.
MODIFY SCREEN.
ENDIF.
ENDLOOP.
Just type ABRACADABRA when you’re at the selection screen and your secret parameter will magically show. If needed, you can then type NORMAL to make it disappear again.
We’re all lazy. It’s just human. Programmers are human. We’re often lazy when it comes to the way we program something. And usually being lazy when making a program will result in someone else having more work when maintaining it.
Let he who is free of laziness throw the first rock.
When I say that I like to use UML class diagrams to document my code, people think I’m crazy.
Introduction
The UML has gained a bad reputation because people think that, first you make the classes diagram in UML and only then write the program. But that was in 1996, when you the good practices said the first thing to do was the whole technical spec, even if no one really did it.
Nowadays, fortunately, we are no longer ashamed to say that the very act of programming is already in itself a way of drawing.
I recently found a program which was generating an SQL statement by concatenating several variables with fixed SQL parts. But, either by not paying attention or simple ignorance, the person who did it, thought it would make sense to associate a text-symbol to each of these variables with. Something like this:
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
Instead of /NXD03 type /*XD03
You’re now automagically inside the transaction, already looking at the details of the last displayed customer
It’s surprising that no one ever told me about this before.
I also tried it with FB03 and it works so it probably works with most of the normal transactions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with the ones I use the most: SE24, SE38 e SE11. What a pity.
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 InspectorLars for making this small but useful tool. Actually, thank you for the dozens of useful tools you’ve already given us. They’re quite impressive.
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?
Every day I learn something new in ABAP. Sometimes I’d rather not learn them. Like this one.
Table T056P has a date field. While SELECTing this table using the date as criteria I couldn’t get any result even though the code seemed correct. Using SE16N I found that the date range was also not working as expected: it would only should results if the final date was put in the LOW field and the initial date in the HIGH. Bizarre.
John created transaction ZFB01 and associated it with program ZFB01 which, after doing some stuff, does a CALL TRANSACTION on FB01. Then came his friend Mike and ran transaction ZFB01.
He managed to start running it because he had permissions to do it. But half way through he got an error because he doesn’t have permissions to run transaction FB01.
Both John and Mike knew that the system administrators would never ever give Mike permission to run FB01.
