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.

O Abapinho saúda-vos.

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.

I won’t!

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Foreword

Introduction

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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:

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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:

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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:

1. Go into the transaction’s selection screen with /NXD03
2. Fill in the customer number an press ENTER to display its details
3. Do whatever it is you want to do there and get out of it
4. Suddenly… you remember that you needed to do something else there
5. Instead of /NXD03 type /*XD03
6. 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.

Now go and tell everyone about this!

Thank you Sérgio Fraga for the tip.

Photo credit: Leonard J Matthews.

Greetings from Abapinho.

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.

Greetings from Abapinho.

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?

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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.

Thank you, Sérgio Fraga for the tip.

Greetings from Abapinho.

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.

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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.

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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.

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If you’re not already using ABAP Objects you’re chicken.

If you use them, I do hope you’re following the best practice of using class exceptions.

And if you’re using class exceptions you better understand the best way of using them, particularly the advantages of chaining them.

This said, here’s what brings us here today. In the post about chained exceptions I showed a way to get the text of the deepest exception in the chain by using a WHILE loop:

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I’ve been using more and more references in ABAP.

I used to use REF TO only for classes but I’ve been finding more and more advantages in using them for other data types. But, just like in C++, care must be used when dealing with data references. Things can easily go very wrong.

In this article, I’ll try to show you how to use and how not to use REF TO DATA. Let’s start by an example of how not to do it.

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

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