ABAP: Eliminating Errors by using exception ERROR_MESSAGE

I have to thank Jeremy Meier for this post.  I have to confess, I’m pretty excited to have my first guest post, so I just wanted to preface his post with a hearty thank you 🙂  The exception ERROR_MESSAGE is a technique I was unfamiliar with until Jer sent this to me.

I discovered this for one of our developers today – he was getting errors in using a standard SAP function module to get material requirements data from an MD04 function module for a report he was writing.  The code was calling a standard message when it hit a rare error check in the code”

if xyz <> abc.
MESSAGE ID ‘123’ TYPE ‘E’ NUMBER sy-msgno WITH sy-msgv1 sy-msgv2 sy-msgv3 sy-msgv4.
endif.

As this is used in MD04, it’s meant to throw the message to the screen – but when he tried to embed this function module in his Z-Report and ran it on a specific material number it caused an error to occur on the expected automated file download to excel to fail.

After looking for the right TRY-CATCH statement – which wouldn’t actully work because there was no “exception” or dump – the solution after digging a bit was to include the exception ERROR_MESSAGE to his function module call, even though it wasn’t a “defined exception” on the function header:

CALL FUNCTION ‘XYZ’
EXPORTING
VALUE1 = VARIABLE1
IMPORTING
VALUE2 = VARIABLE2
EXCEPTIONS
EXCEPTION_A = 1
EXCEPTION_B = 2
ERROR_MESSAGE = 3.

This action trapped the message and saved it to the SYST table where a standard FM can then be used to extract it if necessary, if the function module returns with sy-subrc=3:

if sy-subrc = 3.
CALL FUNCTION ‘BALW_BAPIRETURN_GET2’
EXPORTING
type  = sy-msgty
cl    = sy-msgid
number = sy-msgno
par1  = sy-msgv1
par2  = sy-msgv2
par3  = sy-msgv3
par4  = sy-msgv4
IMPORTING
return = return.
endif.

Realistically, anytime your using SAP function modules that are part of transactions, developers should try to us this to suppress the error messages and return them on their terms.