Get ABAP Development Tools 2.28 and find out what's new

[ThFiedler]

Hi community,

since a couple of days the new version of the ABAP development tools for Eclipse are available on the SAP Tools Updatesite. You can get the version 2.28 via SAP Development Tools for Eclipse. In case you never had installed the ABAP development tools for eclipse before you also find the installation instruction there. This version is still supporting Eclipse Juno and Kepler but not the latest Eclipse version. Support for Luna will come with the next version of the tools.

The new version contains besides a bunch of bug fixes a few small features that might be helpful for you:

• 
  Manually defined system configurations for ABAP projects
  


• 
  Restrict object search to specific types and packages
  


• 
  Quick Assist View
  

Manually defined system configurations for ABAP projects

In order to connect to an ABAP system from eclipse you have to create an ABAP project. Up to now you are only allowed to choose systems that are already configured in your SAP Logon on your PC. With version 2.28 we enhanced the creation of ABAP projects so that it is possible to configure the system connection manually in your ABAP project. You can specify the system connection on the creation wizard. There are now two options available: a.) configuration via SAP Logon (what we have since years) b.) manual defined projects. 

For manual configuration you have to specify the system ID, the application server and the instance number and you are in. The complete information of the manual defined ABAP project is stored within your eclipse workspace.

We often got the feedback that some SAP Logon configurations are not supported within eclipse, e.g. in case the system configuration file is stored on a server. So we hope that the manual defined projects come overcome these issues. Nevertheless we also want to close these gaps for SAP Logon file configurations in the future. Here we are relying on your feedback which options you are missing in eclipse.    

Restrict object search to specific types and packages

One of the most important features of the ABAP tools for Eclipse is the object search via shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-A. This function helps the developer to very easily open development objects in your IDE. Just enter the name (or parts of it) in the search dialog and you will instantly get the results independently what kind of object you are looking for. But there are situations where the result list is too long and you don't see the expected objects. With the new version 2.28 you can further restrict your object search via specifying the ABAP package and the object type. Let's make an example: So assume you want to search for a data element that contains the name BOOLEAN. That's what you have to enter in the search dialog:

    

Now you can further restrict the search result by specifying the package in which you want to search:

You see that we also provide content assist for the available packages in the ABAP system. Content assist is also available for the keywords type/package and the available object types of the ABAP system.

Remark: This feature is currently restricted to AS ABAP release 7.40 SP06.

Quick Assist View

Quick Assist is another very helpful tool within Eclipse that helps the developer to do some tasks very quickly. In the meanwhile we have a lot of these quick assists available in eclipse like renaming of variables and methods or creating of parameters and attributes. All quick assist proposals are context aware meaning that only these proposals are displayed that are useful on the current cursor position. Just press CTRL-1 and you will get the available proposals in a small popup in the editor. Just double-click the assist (or choose via ENTER) that you need and the editor does the rest for you automatically:

This feature is very helpful but sometimes it is hard for the developer to recognize the available proposals because you have to press CTRL-1 every time to see them. To overcome this issue we now introduced a new view in eclipse the so-called Quick Assist view.

This view displays all available quick assist proposals based on the current cursor position. There is also a history available to monitor the quick assists that you already have triggered in the past. This might be very helpful in complex refactoring scenarios to track what kind of code changes you did.

Have fun with the new version and give us feedback.

Kind Regards,

Thomas.