ABAP Coding

So while building my new territory manager, I ran into a small piece that I forgot about.  Adding a checkbox to a table control.  Turns out, it’s pretty easy, but not exactly intuitive.  So, make sure you have a character based column, that is only 1 char in length.  Once you have that, you can do the following.

Right click on the column, select convert->checkbox-> either left or Right button.

it will then convert your character column to a checkbox.

Thanks for reading,

Here’s another new one I discovered.  How often you do write a few lines of code to check if something exists?  For example, a common thing I do is look for an entry in a table?  If it’s there, I need to do something, if not, I move on. For example:

read table Lt_test transporting no lines with key key1 = val1 key2 = val2.

if sy-subrc = 0.

…

else.

…

endif.

Well, in S/4, that has been condensed.

if line_exists( lt_test[key1 = val1 key2 = val2]).

…

else.

…

endif.

you get to skip the read statement.  Now, if you need the contents, this might not help as much, since you would need to extract that line anyway, but if you are purely looking for the existence, then it’s a lot cleaner.

Thanks for reading,

Here’s another fun little tidbit for the new coding in S/4.  If you want to concatenate a string together you used need to do:

CONCATENATE ‘X’ ‘Y’ into lv_var.

now you can do:

lv_var = ‘X’ && ‘Y’.

Even better, you don’t run into type mismatches either.  For example, if you have a time stamp, the value is in a packed format.  This means that you must first concatenate things into a string, then copy them to the final value.  with the &&, you can skip all that and do it in a simple one line statement.

ABAP really is getting better 🙂

Thanks for reading,

I recently had the opportunity to see some code in S/4.  While the old code works, there are certainly some new things that simplify coding life.  One of the fun ones I learned is how you do a smarter data statement.  Here is my first example.  You take in a customer number in the internal format, but you want to convert it to the external format.  Here’s how I do it today:

DATA: lv_kunnr_out TYPE char10.
CALL FUNCTION ‘CONVERSION_EXIT_ALPHA_OUTPUT’
EXPORTING
input = i_kunnr
IMPORTING
output = lv_kunnr_out.

Here’s how you can do it in S/4.

* DATA(lv_kunnr_out) = |{ i_kunnr ALPHA = OUT }|.

Pretty slick.  it’s not gonna change the world, but it nice to make things more readable 🙂

Thanks for reading,

I must say, I was pretty happy with the results of the code inspector.  I was fearing I would have a LOT of rework, but it turned out to be a manageable number of errors/warnings/information.

The only errors I had were all the same message:

Large table X: No WHERE condition

And these revolved around some search help functions that I built for my UI5 applications.  So it was a simple matter of finding an appropriate field to include in the WHERE statement.

Aside from that, all of my warnings/information messages were the same as well:

Possible use of <internal table> without prior content check.

This is the more important one for me.  This is an instance where I populated an internal table, but didn’t check to make sure it was populated before using it in a select statement FOR ALL ENTRIES IN.

I’ve run into this before, and it’s caused crazy long run times before it reads the entire table.  Short story… BAD.  So this is a great way to make sure that I fix any outstanding issues.  It’s a very simple fix.  Add an IF statement around the Select statement to check that it is NOT INITIAL.  Problem solved 🙂

I highly encourage running this, even if you don’t plan to upgrade to HANA anytime soon.  It’s a good method to make sure your code is following some simple standards.

Thanks for reading,

I recently listened to a presentation from some developers that talked about preparing your development objects to move to S/4.  This obviously got my attention, since I want to move my add-ons to be on S/4.  Here’s what I learned.

Apply OSS Note:  2185390

For me, this was a bit more time consuming that I expected.  Because my system is behind the times, it means I had to apply a lot of notes before I could finally apply this one.  So it took me a few hours to gather up all the notes I needed, get them applied.

Next up, you need to create an index.  Here’s what the OSS note tells you:

Before Custom Code Analyzer (program SYCM_DOWNLOAD_REPOSITORY_INFO) can analyze your custom code, an up-to-date where-used index for customer objects as well as SAP objects is required in your system. Custom Code Analyzer will check whether the where-used index is up to date as first processing step and will raise an error log entry if it has to be updated.

In order to update the where-used-index for customer and SAP objects, run program SAPRSEUB as background job in the system to be analyzed.

Currently, in my system, I’m running the index.  It’s been going for almost 12 hours now.  Certainly due to my hardware, but regardless, give it some time.  Once that’s done, you can run the download repository (listed above).  It will give you a zip file listing the areas you need to look at.  I’ll be doing a follow up post on some of the common things I need to fix once I can run the program.

Thanks for reading,