SAP Community Day: ABAP rocks! - Translation of Gr...

matt · ‎10-17-2008

History and Prerequisites

Andreas Blumenthal began with a brief discussion of the long history of ABAP. Initially the acronym for "Allgemeiner Berichts Aufbereitungs Prozessor" ( General report preparation processor ), ABAP was later renamed, "Advanced Business Programming Language". Andreas Blumenthal then discussed the prerequisites for latest extensions. For NetWeaver 7:00 Enhancement Package 2, the latest SAP Kernel 7:20 must be installed. The enhancement package is currently planned to be available from July 2008.

New Language Elements

Horst Keller presented us with some of the new elements of ABAP language. You no longer only have CONCATENATE to link together text, you can now directly assemble text with "|" directly. You can format a date without a temporary variable.

DATA: msg TYPE c LENGTH 100.
msg = |Das Datum von heute: { sy-datum date = environment }|.
MESSAGE msg TYPE 'I'.

This program gives the current date in the locally set form.

Runtime Analyser

Boris Gebhardt, the developer of the new ABAP debugger, showed off the extended Runtime Analyser. With this you can, as in the picture below, drill right down into the details of internal execution, or read or change operations. The example shows, the "Open all objects" in SE80.

Anyway, back to improving the performance of the LOOPs over the internal table. Firstly, in the definition of the internal table in the Data Dictionary, we define a second key, using the new feature of "secondary keys" for internal tables. Then we have to add to the code, using the addition "USING KEY". This improved the access to the table dramatically.

Debugger

In conclusion, Boris Gebhardt introduced the query-based debugging of a Web application. The big advantage here, is when you need to debug a Web application that covers several systems. In the example landscape, a breakpoint was set in the FI system M18. With the current handling of breakpoints, it doesn't work, because it is the RFC connection user that's registered, not the user of the Web application. The same problem can occur on application servers using multiple servers. The breakpoint currently doesn't trigger if it is set on one server, and the RFC actually runs on another.

With query-based debugging, a Terminal-ID (TID) is activated by writing an entry into the registry of the developer's machine. The developer then starts a local Windows program, which reads the TID from the registry, and then launches the browser. Now the web application can be started. The program passes the TID with each request. The TID will also be passed with RFC connections, and Web services called between SAP systems. When the TID reaches the breakpoint it can be debugged.

Q & A

I work a lot with function modules in SAP CRM. Unfortunately, I always get the problem, that due to deep structures and specific data types, there is no framework in SE37 to test them. You always have to create a test report. Andreas Blumenthal replied that there is a project plan for a revision of SE37, but a timetable for implementation has not yet been defined.