We are constantly learning. But once in a while we learn something which is a leap forward forcing us to look in a new way to everything we do. The last time this had happened was when I started using OO in ABAP. OO was not new to me as I had already used it extensively in Java, C#, C++, etc. But to finally be able to apply these precious concepts on my daily job was a relief and a big improvement in the quality, flexibility and speed of my work.

SapGUI usually keeps a history of the last values entered on each field. This is usually a good thing. But you may very well not want it to happen (in case you’re entering pornographic values in a specific field for example). You could always turn it off globally in the SapGUI settings. But what if you just want to disable it in one particular field? Abapinho tells you how to do it.

We are all aware of SAP implicit enhancements which allow you to add code to the top or bottom of any block of standard code (methods, functions, etc). We’ve all used it to make a change to a BAPI or other standard piece of code. But only recently did I find that you can also use these implicit enhancements to add parameters to standard methods and functions.

Toad is a very famous SQL tool which allows you to build and execute SQL queries in an easy and interactive way. And now, thanks to Mr. Sébastien HERMANN, SAP has a simplified version of this wonderful tool. I’ll let him explain. Thank you Sérgio Fraga for spotting this. Greetings from Abapinho.

This is how internal tables used to be declared: DATA: itbl TYPE TABLE OF bkpf.

One of the few things that separates us humans from all the other animals is our ability to think about thoughts. A sparrow may think “I’m scared, I’ll say chirp chirp chirp” and, as a direct consequence, whoever stands close to it will hear “chirp chirp chirp”.

The “where used” tool is very dear to any ABAP developer. Through it one can find out where a given object is used. Doesn’t look like much but we all know how important this is.

Class CL_GUI_FRONTEND_SERVICES is commonly used to upload and download files from and to the user’s local computer. But it can do many more good things. For example:

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? SELECT * INTO T_T005T FROM T005T WHERE LAND1 = I_LAND1 AND SPRAS IN ( 'PT', EN' ). I need to remind you that hard coding values in programs is not the best idea so make sure you know what you’re doing when you choose to apply this approach.

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: