Imagine that you’re editing one of those ancient programs with thousands of lines (yes because today you know that it’s wrong not to modularize (it’s a sin really) your methods (yes because today you always use methods) don’t have more than 200 lines).

You you call a function via RFC you need to provide the RFC DESTINATION for the remote system:

CALL FUNCTION ‘ZSNEEZED’
  DESTINATION ’sistema_longe_daqui’.

What if, for some reason, the function running in the remote system needs to call a function in the original system? How would you do it?

Although a substantial part of an ABAP programmer time is spent debugging code, most programmers I know don’t invest much in getting to know the ABAP debugger. Maybe because they spent too many years working with its previous version which was truly archaic and worthless. But the new one can do much more than you usually ask of it. And Abapinho intends to teach you how.

Today I’ll teach you just a simple key.

When you debug you use F5 key to move to the next statement (or go inside a sub-routine). But imagine an IF with multiple conditions:

IF A = 1 AND B = 2 AND C = 3.
  WRITE 'I like the word glauc'.
ENDIF.

When you debug through that IF using F5 and one of the expressions is false you’ll step out of the IF without knowing which of the three was false.

But the new debugger has a new very neat functionality which can help you to better understand what happened there.

Every once in a while I find yet another hidden SAP virtue. I just found out that there is a transaction which, for a given word in a given language, will help you translate it to another language by showing you which other translations already exist for that same word. How cool is that? Ok, it’s not Google Translate, but it’s a nice help. Oh, I almost forgot. The transaction is called STERM.

Sometimes ABAP SQL doesn’t allow you to do something you’d be able to do using the database’s native SQL. It can still be done.

We’ve all sorted internal tables to use AT NEW on a LOOP. But starting from 7.40, we can use GROUP BY on LOOPs.

The ability to group by values based on expressions or even methods is great.

The grouping is done on the first LOOP and can be processed afterwards. Try running the code below and I bet you’ll be as impressed as I was.

You just found a bug in a standard FORM (or FM or METHDO): FORM EQUAL_VALUE CHANGING W_DATE TYPE SYDATUM. W_DATE = SY-DATUM - 1. ENDFORM. You report the error to SAP but you know it will take them several days, weeks or months to publish a correction. And you need it corrected right now. You decide to act. So you use the implicit enhancement at the start of the FORM to replace the standard code with your own (just until the correction arrives, of course):

Checkpoints is a very powerful ABAP framework which almost nobody uses. Why? Probably for the same reason hardly anyone listens to Sun Ra and knows that Frank Zappa has 102 albums. Because, even though really good, it’s obscure and not commercial. Checkpoints are, indeed, really good and not commercial. But they should be more like Mozart and the Beach Boys which are both good and commercial.

Today we have a guest, Tamás Holics. He owns STA Consulting, a Hungarian company which has created 2 very interesting SAP products. In this article Tamás presents the STA Ticket System.

The problem

A lot of time is wasted in SAP software testing and maintenance processes due to incomplete or incorrect error reports from users and testers. Support people (analysts, developers) usually have to ask for more information about the error. This takes a lot of valuable working time from both the reporters of the error and support people. Solving the problem is often blocked until every information is available.

For many years I’ve been complaining about how backward ABAP development ecosystem is and how long it takes to evolve. Every time he heard me saying it a good friend of mine would wisely advise me to never bite the hand that feeds you.

But how can a man not speak out?

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.