I just found out that SAP can take selfies. I still don’t see why one would need it. But that’s understandable because I never really understood the need for selfies anyway.

Here’s how SAP can take a selfie:

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.

Some times I don’t like the names SAP gave to things. So I change them.

For example, one day I was very angry and thought all customers were parasites.

So I did the following:

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.

When we learn ABAP, we are taught a series of rules on how to name variables. Not everyone uses the same rules but, still, some strict rules are shared between many people:

• Local variables must start with L: L_BUKRS;

• Global variables must start with G: G_MODE;

• Internal tables must have T_: LT_MARA;

• Structures must have S_: LS_MARA;

• Object references must have R_: R_CUSTOMER;

• input parameters must start with I, output with O, changing with C and returning with R.

• And the most stupid of all, field-symbols must start with FS_: <FS_MARA>.

In the early XXI century those rules made some sense (except for the field-symbols on, which was, and still is, as stupid as writing ‘pencil’ in all our pencils). Today they don’t make much sense anymore. Let me explain.