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Author's profile photo Uladzislau Pralat
Uladzislau Pralat
March 31, 2022 1 minute read

Advanced String Manipulations with ABAP CDS Views

ABAP CDS views provide a set of string functions and also support regular expressions from release 7.55. But sometimes your string manipulation requirements go beyond aforesaid capabilities. In this case my blog is for you.

Below is a perfect example, when CDPOS values which are saved as a plain text need to be properly formatted.

Number, percentage and date values need to be identified as such and formatted accordingly. What makes it even more challenging is a requirement to format numbers and dates as per user settings. All above can easily be done using data element casting.

Below function module does the trick. If identifies amounts, percentage and date values using regular expressions and format them according to user settings.

 

 

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      5 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Shanthi Bhaskar
      Shanthi Bhaskar

      Good one, Thanks documenting.

      Author's profile photo Claude-Henri Berger
      Claude-Henri Berger

      Yes, really good idea to use conversion exit to format string using CDS views!!!

      Author's profile photo Nooruddin Bohra
      Nooruddin Bohra

      I think it's the feature of ALV and not the CDS View. I tried to display the data in Data explorer it didn't work.

      I'm on 1909 and I'm in similar situation. While in ABAP the conversion exit is triggering but in CDS it's not.

      define view zprep_message1
  as select from zprep_message
{
  msgnr,
  text,
  msg,
  case when msgnr = '022'
    then cast( ltrim(msg, ' ') as zde_message_text )
    else cast( ltrim(msg, ' ') as zde_message_text ) end as Message
}

       

       

      Author's profile photo Pablo Amburi
      Pablo Amburi

      Hi!

      This is a good idea, but unfortunately when you publish the CDS to use it as an OData service, it doesn´t work, not only the conversion is not executed but also when retrieving the metadata it returns an error. Please consider before using it for string manipulation in FIORI apps.

      Thanks!

      Author's profile photo Uladzislau Pralat
      Uladzislau Pralat
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Pablo,

      thank you for interest in my blog. Fiori apps of use of CDS view string manipulation is beyond the scope of the blog. If you find a solution to your requirement, please share with SAP community.

      Regards, Uladzislau