A recent blurb and link here at SDN prompted me to get the PDF's of Blumenthal and Keller's wonderful ABAP article in SAPProJ on ABAP (Jan/Feb 2006). In that article, the following appears loud and clear: 
And later on, they go on to say that wa's shouldn't even be used - assign's are much better. Why am I mentioning this? Because at a former client, a "hotshot" came in to try and figure out how to satisfy a G/L audit without bringing the machine to its knees but also without using summarized data that might have been adjusted by manual entries. Although this "hotshot" was brought in to do a new functional spec and not a tech code review, he wanted a walk-thru of what we had done (which by the way was working fine, from both a func and tech point of view - only problem with it was that it was using data that might have been "touched" by human hands.) First thing he said during the review was: "Why are you looping into wa's instead of using headers? So I politely answered him by saying that SAP had already gotten rid of them in classes so why code them elsewhere? (Believe it or not, I can be polite.) And he responded by saying he never heard of SAP suggesting that folks stop using headers. (Fortunately my project lead was in the room to back me up.) So it turns out that if this "hotshot" reads the Blumenthal and Keller article, he'll get the "real scoop". In particular, although he was "wronger" than me, we were both wrong: folks should not only NOT be using headers anymore, they should also stop using wa's in favor of assigns. I don't want to tick anyone off any more than I've done lately here at SDN, so I won't bother stating the "moral" of this story. I'm sure it's pretty obvious.
And later on, they go on to say that wa's shouldn't even be used - assign's are much better. Why am I mentioning this? Because at a former client, a "hotshot" came in to try and figure out how to satisfy a G/L audit without bringing the machine to its knees but also without using summarized data that might have been adjusted by manual entries. Although this "hotshot" was brought in to do a new functional spec and not a tech code review, he wanted a walk-thru of what we had done (which by the way was working fine, from both a func and tech point of view - only problem with it was that it was using data that might have been "touched" by human hands.) First thing he said during the review was: "Why are you looping into wa's instead of using headers? So I politely answered him by saying that SAP had already gotten rid of them in classes so why code them elsewhere? (Believe it or not, I can be polite.) And he responded by saying he never heard of SAP suggesting that folks stop using headers. (Fortunately my project lead was in the room to back me up.) So it turns out that if this "hotshot" reads the Blumenthal and Keller article, he'll get the "real scoop". In particular, although he was "wronger" than me, we were both wrong: folks should not only NOT be using headers anymore, they should also stop using wa's in favor of assigns. I don't want to tick anyone off any more than I've done lately here at SDN, so I won't bother stating the "moral" of this story. I'm sure it's pretty obvious.
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