ABAP Mentor

Overview

I got a lots of questions for my previous post, Where Can You Find Your ABAP Source Code?. You asked me about what theme I use when I work in ABAP Workbench. A few of you really liked the dark theme, I used during the recordings. This is a custom font and color scheme.

Overview

SAP stores your ABAP code in the database. But what does it actually mean? Let me explain this on an example.

Overview

Alright, now we arrived to our last 7.4 release news post (for a while), namely the Support Package Stack 08, that gives us additional new features and extends existing ones. Of course, there are many of them again, but as you already know, I will only demonstrate you the most interesting ones, that are the followings:

• predicative method calls >> using predicate methods within logical expressions
  [IF order->is_closed( ) ...],
  
• internal table filtering >> selecting or removing rows effectively from an internal table
  [DATA(...) = FILTER #( ... USING KEY ... WHERE ... )],
  
• new way of defining fields list in SELECT >> listing fields easily in a complex SELECT
  [SELECT scarr~carrname spfli~* sflight~fldate],
  
• inline declaration for SELECT >> storing data from the database without defining internal tables
  [SELECT ... INTO TABLE @DATA(flight_schedules)].
  

Overview

Here we go again, another week, another Support Package Stack also! As you remember, in the previous post we have talked about the new features of the ABAP 7.4 SP02, and today I want to continue this habit and talk about the new features of the 7.4 SP05. We are going to talk about very powerful features, like: how to make component-by-component assignments of two very different structures, how to build the content of an internal table based on another internal table, and at last what the SQL Expression are in ABAP.

Overview

In the last few posts, I demonstrated you some new features of the 7.4 Release in detail: the different Inline Declarations (DATA or FIELD-SYMBOL), the VALUE and NEW Constructor Expressions, or the Table Expressions.

Today, I want to do a bit different, than before. For this, I have collected the best improvements of our ABAP language in the Support Package 02, and I would like to share it with you in a single post.

Overview

I hope, you are also satisfied with the new features of the 7.4 Release, you could have try out the different Inline Declarations (DATA or FIELD-SYMBOL), or you got the feeling of using the VALUE and NEW Constructor Expressions.

Today, we will deep dive into another topic, named Table Expressions. We can think of the table expressions as the short form for the READ TABLE statement.

All I can say is, that I was very happy, when I first heard about table expressions, because I just worked on a complex XML parser ABAP program, that used Simple Transformation to parse a really deep and complex XML structure. I made good use of the table expression, when I had to expand the deep structure into a simple flat structure.

So, what are the table expressions?

Overview

In the last two blog posts, we have talked about how inline declarations (DATA, FIELD-SYMBOL) can make our code thinner, more readable and transparent.

Today, we go ahead, and continue examining the new features of the 7.4 Release, and talk about the Constructor Expressions.

Overview

I think, the code examples spoke for themselves in the previous post, they're thin, readable, and transparent! That's what I want! Today, I'm going to show you another great feature of the 7.4, called Field Symbol inline declaration.

Actually, we need to comply the same rules for Field Symbol inline declarations as in the case of the Data inline declarations.

Overview

After finishing the blog post series, called 5 Ways to Improve the Readability of Your ABAP Code, I was thinking a lot about the topic of the next blog post series.

In the last few months, I worked with many 7.4 based SAP systems, developed many ABAP programs, and thanks to this, I had chances to try out the different new features, that the SAP has implemented. Since during my works, these improvements helped me a lot, and found them very useful, I decided to share them with you.

Overview

In the last few posts we have talked about why to use meaningful identifier names, why to avoid magic numbers, the benefits of organizing our code with functions, and the role of formatting. 

Now, I want to talk about the last part of my readability puzzle, the comments.

Comments serve as annotations in our source code, usually we leave these kind of notes to make ourselves and the others remember what the given portion code is actually doing.

However there are cases when these notes creates misunderstandings, for example when it's not up to date with the associated code.