International Editable SALV Day 2020

[hardyp180]

YEAR TWELVE

Dear CL_SALV_TABLE Fans,

Welcome to February 8^th, 2020 which is the twelfth International Editable SALV Day. See below for a link to a blog I wrote to celebrate this day exactly one year ago:-

https://blogs.sap.com/2019/02/08/international-editable-salv-day-2019/

This day marks the 12^th anniversary of James Hawthorne going cap in hand to SAP and suggesting maybe the CL_SALV_TABLE could be brought up to functional parity with the CL_GUI_ALV_GRID and have an option to be editable.

https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/733872

To sum things up – opinion is divided here – every single customer of SAP wants the SALV_TABLE to be editable, but SAP says no all of you do not actually want that, you do not know what you want, you foolish fools you.

So – what is new this year? Obviously nothing new from SAP- the CL_SALV_TABLE is still as rigid as it always was, and always will be.

One argument SAP could put up was that everyone has to move to S/4HANA and in the cloud version there is no SAP GUI and the ALV is a GUI based report so therefore there is no point in fixing the obvious error we made with CL_SALV_TABLE. However this very month the deadline for S/4HANA migration was moved from 2025 to 2030. So another ten years of the SAP GUI – at least – and moreover the vast bulk of customers who have moved to S/4HANA thus far at least) have chosen the on-premise option and I bet most of them still use the SAP GUI, rightly or wrongly.

The other interesting thing that happened this week which has an analogy to what happened with CL_SALV_TABLE was this amazing blog. The blog itself is not so amazing compared to the response it invoked.

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/02/04/sap-build-product-sunset/

What that blog was all about was shutting down a product before an equivalent replacement for that product was available, hence the highly emotional response from the community.

What has that to do with CL_SALV_TABLE you might say? The story is somewhat similar in that we are told to stop using CL_GUI_ALV_GRID as that is old hat, and here is a replacement that cannot do half of what the old product can do, but it is new so you are mandated to use it.

There is no point going around and around in circles. Here is the situation summed up:-

• The ALV is going to be in use for the next 10-20 years, possibly longer.


• SAP want everyone to use CL_SALV_TABLE


• Developers who do live to regret it – because it is not editable and the business ALWAYS want it to be editable


• It became apparent 12 years ago that every single SAP customer wants SAP to change its mind on this, but it never will because ... because it will not.

Now it is the nature of human beings to want things to improve, so hopefully when the 8^th of February 2021 rolls around and I post this blog again my level of bitterness about the whole thing will have increased. The bitterer I get the more free pints of “Best Bitter” I am awarded (that’s a sort of drink – beer - in the UK by the way).

We do after all want every year to be better than the last in some sense.

Just in case it is not clear what this is all about – we all like the CL_SALV_TABLE it is great. Just make it at least as good as its predecessor. Make it editable.



Cheersy Cheers

Paul