It took me a long time but I finally got rid of the damn prefixes.

ABAP 7.4 brought a lot of lauded novelties. Of all of them, the one less talked about is MESH. Let’s analyse it and see how unfair that has been.

When you need to make mass changes to ABAP code, the SAPGui IDE isn’t of much help. Eclipse ADT is better, especially if you just want to rename stuff. But there are lots of changes which you won’t be able to automate there. Namely, changes that most be done hundreds of times and which cannot be done with a simple find and replace. In these cases you probably end up changing everything manually. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

When you’re going to modify existing records of a database table it is common to first SELECT them to see how they are and only then UPDATE them with what they will be.

When I get to a new project the system administrator generates a development key for each development system assigned to our SAP username. Usually it’s sent to me by e-mail. Usually I lose track of it.

The new way to get data from internal tables is also the new way to put data into internal tables.

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.