Abapinho's best practices
Recently, I have compiled a set of personal best practices. I decided to share them here by creating a new category (which will soon appear on the menu to the left) into which they will be grouped. The original idea was to make a PDF file but, since they are constantly being reviewed and expanded, this was largely impractical. As such, they will be published one by one.
The goal is for these practices to be visible in their entirety as a user-friendly, accessible reference. I don’t know about you, but I, for one, will be using them.
The ABAP detective
When a development is completed in SAP, the time to send it to other systems where it can be duly tested and then executed by users has finally arrived. Before that occurs, however, it has to be checked for lapses, errors and other problems that could lead to our programmes behaving in an unpredictable manner. There is a very useful tool that allows some of these errors and gaps to be filtered out. It is called ABAP Code Inspector.
Close the frozen window
Exemplary example of SALV
Unless you want to do data editing, the only dignified way to use ALVs these days is through SALV classes. They are more modern and more elegant, and those who use them can achieve a social status until now only available to owners of a license plate.
Hold on… but not yet
You are doing a LOOP AT in a 1000-line table, and you know that you want line 853. Until recently, you had two options: either hit F8 852 times, running the risk of hitting it 853 times and having to start all over again, or create a watchpoint with the condition SY-TABIX = 852 or something close, and pray that it worked.
Now you have a third option.
APPEND LINES OF class->method() TO itbl
ABAP is getting smarter all the time. Back in my day, no one did anything with it. And now, slowly, more than a fifth of a century late, it’s trying to imitate C and Java, and becoming more flexible.
I was going to do something like this:
Automatic keyboard
Every programmer knows about the intimate relationship between batch-inputs and paperweights, staplers and similar heavy objects. These precious little helpers can keep us from spending up to eight hours hitting the “ENTER” key with one finger.
Although these objects have a certain charm, the law of gravity - the same one that makes them useful - sometimes makes them fall over and stop pushing this key.
Adding values to a standard domain
If you think it’s impossible to add values to a standard SAP domain without requesting an activation key, you’re wrong.
ABAP sucks
Go to the ABAP Editor (SE38) and check out line 323 of standard program RCIFCUST.
If you’re lazy, here it is:
SAP programmers are wild.
Thanks Brian Wolfe for the photo.
Greetings from Abapinho


