ID’s and Sub-ID’s in transaction SAT

Overall the documentation of the SAP system has improved the last years. If not documented we developer mostly have the possibility to trace the meaning or functionality with the help of table entries, roll names fixed values and so on.

But sometimes there are data definitions that are very generic and do not help at all. Often they exist in very common objects like CL_GUI_ALV_GRID (good luck if you want to find out what the fields of NO_TOTARR, VAL_DATA or XDIRECT structure LVC_S_LAYO effect…).

When analyzing a performance issue using transaction SAT I stumbled upon some 1-digit-fields in the list view of an SAT-trace.

list trace file

First of all you might want to know what exactly I am talking about. I am in transaction SAT on the evaluate tab where all existing SAT traces are listed. Normally you will double click on a line and you will end up in the runtime analysis view:

But there is another thing you can do and that is click on the icon Trace File:

If you do that you will come to the following list:

And there are three fields with the title R, I and S.

If you place the cursor on one field and hit F1 you get the well known message “No documentation available”. In this case it is because the three fields are typed as CHAR(1).

In the following I would like to inform you about the meaning of these three fields.

Field: Record type

The first field “R” is the record type. Whatever that means. I didn’t find any detail about it. I could imagine the follwing:

• P = Program
• M = Method
• S = SQL-something

I didn’t find more than these three options.

Field: ID

The second field is the ID of a Trace Record (Recorded Event). The right data element is SATR_DE_ID.

Field: Sub-ID

the third field, the sub-ID belongs to the second field ID. The correct data element would be SATR_DE_SUBID.

ID and Sub-ID

The ID and sub-ID of a recorded event can be found in table SATR_ID_SUBID SATR: Table of ID/SUBID Combinations.

If the table might be empty then take a look at class CL_ABAP_TRACE_TEXT method FILL_DBTAB.

There is a second table which values seem to be mixed into the IDs: The table SATR_ID_SUBID_SD with description RT Analysis: ID/SubID Text Assignment for Sequence Diagram.

Conclusion

At least it might not be important to know the ID and sub-ID, because the knowledge about it is shown in the tree view of the main measurement view. The ID “m” and Sub-ID “x” means: Call Method. You will also find it in the tree view:

Never the less I always find it interesting how SAP stores it’s data and how views on the same data can differ.