IF branches should be small
Picture yourself as a monkey hanging from a tree branch. You want to jump to another branch but it’s so far away that you cannot see it. If you jump you’ll probably fall to the ground. That’s bad.
Picture yourself as a monkey hanging from a tree branch. You want to jump to another branch but it’s so far away that you cannot see it. If you jump you’ll probably fall to the ground. That’s bad.
In the last years of the previous century, an SAP project manager stubbornly opposed to upgrading the SAP system. Instead, he decided that all the SAP notes belonging to that upgrade were to be manually implemented. All 1000 of them.
This Tuesday I was invited by Renan Correa to participate in his podcast “Sem especificação”.
There are many excuses not to use the new functional syntax of ABAP 7.4. One is complaining that it’s impossible to debug.
But it is not.
Data entered by the user is one of the main vulnerabilities of a programme.
Are you sure your SQL is bulletproof?
When ABAP programmers run into a LOOP they like to use it to get as many things done as possible. Even if that LOOP ends up having hundreds or thousands of lines.
ABAP evolves (even though it stood mostly still for too many years). And as it evolves, it leaves behind some commands and syntax constructions which are replaced by better ones.
Besides learning what’s new it is also important to learn what becomes obsolete.
When a program is bad because it has duplicate code, it usually becomes shorter once we rewrite it to make it better. But, if its problem is not being properly structured into several classes and methods, if we rewrite it according to the best practices, it will probably end up longer.
Most ABAP programmers are like swans. They marry ABAP forever and are eternally faithful.
Unfortunately that is not what happens in most of the Z code I have seen in my life as an ABAP programmer. Both IFs and LOOPs tend to grow bigger than anyone can deal with. I recently ran into a LOOP with over 1500 lines.
Did you know that, if you SAP is recent enough, you can use complex ABAP expressions in the middle of SQL commands?
Please stop. Too many regressions happen because someone forgets to CLEAR or to not CLEAR a variable.
Legibility is very important in all written text. Except, maybe, in concrete poetry.
As a follow up to the previous post, here are a couple of rules to help you deal with the negative in boolean expressions.