Reflection is the ability of a program to see itself. ABAP has a series of reflective capabilities, such as RTTS or the ability to dynamically generate code. There are also a few other so-and-so functions that do this and that. Today I present one of them to you:

GET_GLOBAL_SYMBOLS

Every now and then we’ll be looking for user-exits and BADIs, BTEs and the like. SAP doesn’t help. But programs appear here and there, almost always called Z_USEREXIT, which help with this unappreciated search. Recently I learned of another one. I share it here because it is the best I have ever seen: https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Snippets/Find+User-exits,+BADIs,+BTEs,+Etc+by+TCode+or+Program Thanks to Bruno Esperança for the tip. And thank you rverscha for the photo. Greetings from Abapinho.

You know how you sometimes have a STRING-type variable and you need to send it to a function that needs it in SOLIX-type? It often happens to me. Well, I have found this great class that converts strings into a wide range of formats:

CL_BCS_CONVERT

Turn down the music. Close the door. Look around. Is anyone looking at you? Are you being watched? Are there any security cameras? If not, we can go on.

They say that competition in trade is good. Good for consumers, that is. It lowers prices and so on. But inside computers it creates problems for those using them.

Usually, competition is contained in ABAP at the data level, blocking ( euqueue ) certain tables based on their key. But sometimes, something more violent may be required to ensure that a program may not run more than once at the same time. The ESINDX lock object can be used to do this.

ABAP programs are all too well behaved, too predictable.

As demiurges, we have a moral obligation to give them a little free will, give them a scent of chaos, show them the trees of life and of knowledge, and in a passage through kenosis , give them free reign to take a bite from the apple. Only in this way will we feel complete and fulfilled, only by this means will we be able to rest on the seventh day.

There is nothing better to achieve this than random numbers.

Remote function calls (by RFC) do not support parameters with complex structures (deep structures). In other words, if any of the parameters has a structure in which one of the fields is another structure or an internal table then, hard luck, it won’t work.

Do you give up? No, you don’t. Abapinho provides the solution: serialization.

You have just produced a wonderful report headed by a selection screen crammed full of very interesting fields. But usually those running the report will not know, if it has some complexity, what each of the fields does. There are, of course, the technical and functional specifications for this. But are there? And even if there are, wouldn’t it be easier if you could press F1 on top of each field and find out there and then what it’s for?

I’ll show you two possible ways to give individualized information about the fields of a selection screen.

There are various ways of creating an Excel spreadsheet in ABAP. Some are more masochistic than others and some are certainly more lousy than others.

At the bottom right corner of ABAP editor, right in the status line, you can check in which line and column the cursor is. By double clicking over that information a dialog box is shown and you will be able to introduce a line number to it skip directly. The short key is CTRL-O. It’s very helpful. Thank you Fábio Branquinho for the tip. And thank you to juandesant for the photo.

Did you know that is possible to search in SAP menus? Probably yes. Well, I didn’t. I’ve spent years looking through menu S000 searching for the most random stuff imaginable. I’m sure that if I had done menu search I would have found most of them in seconds. Sometimes you just don´t think of the obvious. Thank you Sérgio Fraga for the tip. Greetings from Abapinho.

Some numbers have dots, some numbers have commas and some numbers have dots and commas. The problem is that there are also numbers that have commas and dots. The thing is, there are commas that are dots and dots that are commas, depending on where you are from, in other words, depending on user’s configurations. When importing a file with decimal numbers, these numbers’ alpha-numeric fields must be converted into numeric fields.

The dictionary has the following entry for “style”: “set of formal aspects and expressive resources that characterise a text.”

It is preferable to read a text with style than one without. If ABAP were a language, a program in ABAP would be a text. When it comes to style, there are programs that seem to have been written by the feet, while there are others that one would swear the quill that wrote them was guided by the pure hand of an eighteenth century lady plagued by the troubles of love. Fortunately, I think it’s not possible to write programs in ABAP as tacky as the last sentence.

The “style” label is used here in Abapinho to identify articles that talk about just that: style. These articles try to find ways to improve the style of ABAP programs. This is one of Abapinho’s favourite labels, as you can see here. And what you are reading is another of those articles.

Moving on.

I have a number of friends working as managers, lawyers, marketers, programmers, etc., at very dynamic and competitive companies who are allegedly very busy and are always up to their eyeballs in work. They dedicated several years of their lives to their degrees in order to specialise in a particular field and some of them have put in the extra effort to get a postgraduate diploma in order to be better qualified and therefore able to do more both better and faster. However, the vast majority of them use two fingers when typing at a computer. Over a number of years they have acquired many skills that supposedly make them ultra efficient and yet they still type with two fingers.

(actualizado em 16 de Junho) Queres aprender ABAP e moras em São Paulo? Se sim, aqui está a tua oportunidade. ZTREINAMENTO vai realizar um curso de 8 6 semanas que custará R$1.200,00 R$750,00 e é adequado a pessoas sem qualquer conhecimento de ABAP. Serão abordados os seguintes temas: Entendendo alguns conceitos de ABAP Comandos básicos Data Dictionary Trabalhando com funções Trabalhando com module pool