In the ‘bad old days’ when the ABAP was even more old-fashioned than today, variable statements were all made through LIKE and were referenced to table fields:

DATA: V_KUNNR LIKE KNA1-KUNNR.

Some people read the TCURX to find out the number of decimal places of a CURRENCY when they need to write a money field to an alphanumeric variable.

Are you one of those people? Don’t be.

Finally, the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Enhancement Package 2 makes ABAP start to seem like a normal programming language.

It even allows expressions to be concatenated, no less!

When reading a file with numeric values to an internal table or vice versa, the success of the conversion depends on whether the user has defined the dot or comma as the decimal separator. It is customary to then go and read the user setting and then adjust the values from the file with a dot or a comma as required.

But this is unfortunate and rather inelegant. There should be a way of not making this depend on the user.

And there is.

Imagine you have a herd of related classes sharing between them a whole bunch of constants. Saying the same thing a different way, would you like all the classes of the herd to have easy access to the bunch of constants?

(If you’re confused, then let me tell you that the “herd” thing was just to baffle you)

Carrying on…..

I am using RANGEs more and more. I use them at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and outside meal times. It’s like soy sauce. A few spoonfuls and everything is instantly tastier.

Let’s start by assuming that you have some dignity and so you don’t use internal tables with HEADER LINE anymore ;)

Given this, let’s suppose you declare an internal table:

The harsh truth, at all costs, is that structures are out of date. Nowadays FIELD-SYMBOLS are in.

When you make a LOOP to an internal table of course that you also use ASSIGNING FIELD-SYMBOL instead of INTO Structure,correct?

But what was screwing everything over was APPEND and INSERT. I did not know how to use a structure to add records

SAP has a book called Official ABAP Programming Guidelines which describes rules and best practices on how to program in ABAP. In there you can read: Page 42: Rule 3.1: Use ABAP Objects whenever possible for new and further developments. Classic processing blocks may be newly created in exceptional cases only. Page 45: Within such a [classic] processing block, however, you should immediately delegate the execution to a suitable method (see Rule 6.

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.

If you are one of those who insert the values directly in code instead of using constants, then read no more and go and stand over there in the corner on punishment for 1 hour to learn not to be lazy. If you’ve come back from punishment or you usually use constants, then please continue reading.

There are increasingly more objects in ABAP, gradually less fear of them and, lo and behold, more and more people are writing and using them. It is normal and desirable, if objects begin to appear everywhere, to start to stuff them into internal tables. I also stored a load of objects in tables a while back, unfortunately I did not know at that time what I am going to teach you here. It could have come in handy.

So, what exactly am I going to teach you here?

Do you want to obtain the text from a message when you only know the ID and the number, but you don’t know how? Find out here: DATA text TYPE string. MESSAGE ID '00' TYPE 'E' NUMBER '163' WITH '123' INTO text. That’s all it is. Now inside the text variable, you find the following text: “Client 123 does not exist in the system” Thanks to Peteris B for the photo.

Sometimes I ask myself what percentage of the world’s ABAP code is unnecessary. A paradigmatic example of how time can be wasted writing code which is of no use to anyone and only creates problems is the ALV’s all-too-common field description definition sitting directly in ABAP.

For twelve long years When I wanted to count The lines of an itab I did what everyone does: DESCRIBE TABLE itab LINES linhas. Until the other day When (my eyes didn’t deceive me) I saw something so new, You wouldn’t believe me: LINES( itab ). It gives the same outcome And does away with declaring The damn variable. So instead of: DATA: linhas TYPE i. DESCRIBE TABLE itabl LINES linhas.