Even though you look at an SAP system as a whole, it is composed by several distinct and interconnected parts. There is a small standard program which checks if each part’s clock is correct and synchronised.

It probably won’t be of much use for your daily work. Still, it’s an interesting curiosity.

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The view below shows how simple it is to create the conditions to inject ABAP commands into programs in a productive system.

I considered whether to publish this. But, as it already happened in the past, I believe it is better for this to be known because it is very important for system administrators to be aware of this so they can protect their systems against this threat.

Thank you Ricardo Monteiro for the tip.

Greetings from Abapinho.

Some time ago you created a table and its maintenance screens as local objects.

When, later, you regret it and decide to transport the table, how will you be able to also transport the maintenance screens?

Transporting the maintenance screens function group together with the table is not enough.

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John created transaction ZFB01 and associated it with program ZFB01 which, after doing some stuff, does a CALL TRANSACTION on FB01. Then came his friend Mike and ran transaction ZFB01.

He managed to start running it because he had permissions to do it. But half way through he got an error because he doesn’t have permissions to run transaction FB01.

Both John and Mike knew that the system administrators would never ever give Mike permission to run FB01.

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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?

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Nuno Morais developed a very useful tool which can compare objects between systems and works much better than transaction SREPO.

Abapinho will be its official repository.

Code in GitHub.

Soon, an instruction manual. Until then, go on and try it. If you like it or have any suggestion please leave a comment here.

Thank you Nuno for having developed this and for sharing it with the world in Abapinho.

Thank you AJ Cann for the photo.

Greetings from Abapinho.

When you touch an object and add it to a transport request, it becomes locked there by default. In a transport request you can also lock objects which are not yet locked in another order. But, once locked, how to unlock them?

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The other day, a series of things crashed in our test machine. All of a sudden, no one could work on it. We found a series of transport requests improperly transported to STMS. The user who appears to be associated with each of these requests is its owner. But is it the owner’s fault? Didn’t someone else do the transport?

How can we find out?

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Here’s a cool mini-function to obtain some details of a remote system accessible by RFC:

RFC_SYSTEM_INFO

I cannot give any example here because it would reveal very important secret information about my client which would certainly be used by the baddies to perform industrial espionage. But it is easy to test in SE37.

Thanks to kingofthebigmacs for the photo.

Greetings from Abapinho.

You want to call an RFC function in another system but, because you’re not a carrion eater, you only want to do it if it’s alive.

Hence, you need a way of checking whether that particular destination RFC system is alive.

How do you do that?

Charles Santana does it like this:

DATE: rfcdest         TYPE rfcdest,
           ping_status TYPE /sdf/e2e_traffic_light_numeric.

CALL FUNCTION '/SDF/RFC_CHECK'
 EXPORTING
   iv_destination = rfcdest
   iv_ping        = 'X'
*    iv_logon       = 'X'
*    iv_latency     = 'X'
 IMPORTING
   ev_ping_status = ping_status.
if lv_ping_status <> 1.
* it’s dead.
endif.

Thanks Charles.

Greetings from Abapinho.

You’ve screwed up the productive system. You made a change to a method of a class (or to a function, whatever). Someone else makes another change to another method of the same class (or to another function of the same group of functions, whatever) and saves it to a different transport. When you transport your changes to the productive system, you discover that the class (or function, whatever) now has a syntax error because the changes had interdependencies. You also discover that now, until you get this problem resolved, all your functional co-workers hate you.

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If you really need to access an SAP and nobody lets you, and you don’t have a computer where you can install it or you don’t have enough know-how or patience to do it, you can always rent.

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It’s been a while since Abapinho played with fire. Today he will.

Because today he’ll show you how to execute DOS commands on the user’s local machine. After you finish reading this article, you’ll be ready to format the hard disks of all your users. Dealing with danger helps make us aware of the power we have and the responsibility that comes with it. Dear reader, listen to your conscience.

Don’t try this at home! Try it at the office ;)

DATA: i_returncode TYPE i.

CALL FUNCTION 'GUI_EXEC'
  EXPORTING
    command = 'FORMAT'     " This ain't  no HELLO WORLD!
*    parameter = 'T:'
  IMPORTING
        returncode = i_returncode.

Hey, I was only joking. Don’t play with fire. You’ll get burnt.

Thanks to alifaan for the photo.

Greetings from Abapinho.

SAPlink is a Z program that is installed in the development environment and which enables a wide variety of object types to be imported and exported from the Workbench.

Take a look here at some examples of how SAPlink can be used:

• To transfer a table from one SAP system to another
• To share a class on the internet
• To make a local security backup of a set of programs before making a dangerous change
• To keep a development in our personal repository (in Evernote, of course) in case you need it later in another project
• Etc.

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There are some projects in which the authorisations group associated with table maintenance is always &NC&, that is, Not Classified. It signals that everything there is friendly and nobody is hurting anyone else. But there are other projects where authorisation groups are taken seriously. But this is not synonymous with saying that they are organised. Serious or not, usually it all ends in a big mess, with nobody knowing who is authorised to do what.

This tip may help.

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