New ABAP Editor in NetWeaver 7.0+ has many great features that were not available in old ABAP Editor like
- Customizable syntax highlighting
- Code outlines (i.e., collapsible blocks)
- Code hints and code completion
- Personalized code templates
- Advanced clipboard functionality
- Incremental search and customizable keyboard shortcuts
Most of these options can be customized as per one's choice and these can make life much easier while doing ABAP development (as shown in image below).
A couple of days ago due to some malfunctioning in operating system of my notebook pc, I had to temporarily worked on another workstation for my ABAP Development work but when I started new ABAP Editor, every option that I had customized according to my personal choice had gone. So what happened ?
As I had expected these settings might been saved in User Master Data. But this was not the case. Investigating further about SAP GUI Options of SAP Logon Application, I found a path to Local Configuration Files as shown in following image (I am using SAP GUI for Windows Release 720 on Windows 7).
Checking its parent folder, I found a folder named SAP GUI and in this folder, a folder named ABAP Editor (Path 'F:\Users\Farhan\AppData\Roaming\SAP\SAP GUI\ABAP Editor' on my PC Running with Windows 7 OS). It was found that New ABAP Editort stored the personalization settings in different XML files which are stored in ABAP Editor folder.
There were a copule of XML files present in this in ABAP Editor folder A special file named version.bin stores information about these files along with their version information as shown below.
There were a couple of Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations files that contains information for these XML files to be used when viewed in some XML document viewer like Internet Explorer etc as shown for Settings.xml in image below.
Here is a brief list of files along with the short description (offcourse there are many more).
File Name | Description |
Settings.xml | General settings for AB4Editor control |
keymap.xml | Keyboard mapping file |
abap_spec.xml | Language specification for ABAP |
abap_user.xml | User specific settings for ABAP |
acont_spec.xml | ABAP control blocks (q8) |
acorrect.xml | Auto correction file |
bsp_spec.xml | Language specification for BSP |
So after knowing all this I did a back up of these files in ABAP Editor folder of my notebook and copied these to same folder on workstation I was working on. After that I restarted the SAP Logon Application and then offcourse ABAP Editor.
WOW........... All of the customization of New ABAP Editor options that I had done so far was back again. So often do a backup of these files in case you ever lost your customized options settings of New ABAP Editor. To play safe do ensure that you have same SAP GUI for Windows Release version installed on target PC in case of restore.
Although in my opinion there must be option to store these settings in syetem's user master data in the database and there must be an option for backup/restore these settings in case a user wants to replicate same customized options (he/she had opted) to some other SAP System for use.
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