What I Really Like about the New SAP Community

There are a lot of posts about things that can be improved in the new SAP Community (and I guess they will).

What I will point out in this blog is something that is really positive, at least for me.

It’s the advanced capabilities for displaying source code in posts. Thanks so much for that.

Copying source code from source code editors into blogs wasn’t too straight forward in the old SCN. Normally I copied it first to notepad to get rid of non compatible formats and then to the blog editor where I had to format it tediously by hand.

When writing a blog now,

• you simply hit the {;} in the toolbar (or CODE in discussions),
• you get a kind of notepad where you can copy your source code into,
• you select a language from a value list that even includes ABAP

And that’s it!

The following

gives

SELECT FROM scarr
       FIELDS *
       INTO TABLE @DATA(scarr).

CALL TRANSFORMATION id SOURCE scarr = scarr
                       RESULT XML DATA(xml).

cl_demo_output=>display_xml( xml ).

And the following

gives

<asx:abap version="1.0" xmlns:asx="http://www.sap.com/abapxml">
 <asx:values>
  <SCARR>
   <SCARR>
    <MANDT>000</MANDT>
    <CARRID>AC</CARRID>
    <CARRNAME>Air Canada</CARRNAME>
    <CURRCODE>CAD</CURRCODE>
    <URL>http://www.aircanada.ca</URL>
   </SCARR>
   <SCARR>
    <MANDT>000</MANDT>
    <CARRID>AF</CARRID>
    <CARRNAME>Air France</CARRNAME>
    <CURRCODE>EUR</CURRCODE>
    <URL>http://www.airfrance.fr</URL>
   </SCARR>
   <SCARR>
    <MANDT>000</MANDT>
    <CARRID>AZ</CARRID>
    <CARRNAME>Alitalia</CARRNAME>
    <CURRCODE>EUR</CURRCODE>
    <URL>http://www.alitalia.it</URL>
   </SCARR>
  </SCARR>
 </asx:values>
</asx:abap>

Language specific syntax coloring for free, posh!

Only a small caveat. When displaying a post with source code it may take some time until it is formatted and until the syntax coloring appears (sometimes you even have to refresh to format the source code).