This year I've organized ABAP Code Retreat in Tychy for the second time. In this recap I want not only tell you about the event itself, but also about how the whole organisation of the event took place. If you'll read it to the end, you'll notice that it is not that hard :) 

I've organized one such event before in 2017, when Christian Drumm was leading the whole event. I was very satisfied that 16 from 24 registered participants, so my expectations were that this time it will be more persons. I aslo knew exactly how much food and drinks I need for the event, what path of organisation to follow, but if you want to organize such event, then I'll point all needs and steps, so you can see if maybe you can organize such event also.

Have you received someday an error from your ABAP object saying that "The statement SELECTION-SCREEN is not allowed within FORM routines and function modules." and you wondered why it is blocked to manipulate the five custom function codes on selection-screen? Well, definitely I have and it was really annoying as I wanted to be able to dynamically assign the slection-screen function key depending if it's already used by program or not.

To make long story short - I was correcting one day an old-style written code to include two additional function keys on selection-screen, which were "Favorite variants" and "Clear All fields". They are quite useful but you always had to attach an include(s) to your program and then call specific forms from it. One of the include contained the lines with statements SELECTION-SCREEN FUNCTION KEY 1 & 2, the other defnition for TABLES: sscrfields. I've move the logic to class instead of includes so I could get rid of the need of having them in the programs but I couldn't do anything with this statement as it's not possible to use it within the method. So I've let this statement to be added manually always while using the "Favorite" and "Clear All Fields" function.

Few days ago I've started to work on the created class again while users wants the favorite function to be extended, so after some refactoring and cleaning of my old bad programming, I've decided to check again if there is no really possibility to show or hide the function key on the selection-screen dynamically from method call. 

I knew already that whenever you handle selection-screen then program RSDBRUNT is called which is manipulating the output of the selection screen and also the GUI status. 

After some debugging I found interesting global variables there: CURRENT_SCREEN and CURRENT_SCR. 

CURRENT_SCREEN contained the information about active function keys and CURRENT_SCR together with lots other information - the table which is used to exclude function codes from GUI Status.

This is funny story, I tend to lock myself many times on the DEV system because of the wrong typing of the password. Mainly it happened when I switch the layout of the keyboard in Windows from Polish to German.

Normally it would not be a problem to ask your colleagues which is sitting next to you, to unlock your user, but because of the company policy, we cannot manage other IT colleagues accounts in SAP. So I was asking always Basis team to unlock me, but as I do it often, then I said to myself, that there need to be an option to unlock myself without bothering my Basis colleagues.

And there is one.

But there are two prerequisites - you need to have access to other system that has trusted RFC connection to the DEV system and you have to have debugging rights with possibility to make changes during debugging. In most cases I think this is standard for developer :)

OK, so here are the steps:

1. On system to which you have access go to SE37/SE80 and run ABAP4_CALL_TRANSACTION FM with proper RFC target of your DEV system and transaction SU01.

I was many times disappointed about the time Eclipse needs to start, but I thought that's the way it should be, especially that my previous PCs were not the fastest one and with small amount of RAM-memory. I was cleaning the installations each time I was installing new version of IDE by removing not needed plug-ins, especially that I'm working in Eclipse mainly with ABAP and ADT tools. But even if the installation looks quite clean, still on my new PC which has lots of RAM and very nice processor the starting time of Eclipse was horrible. Also sometimes I've felt that the performance of the editor is not the best ( even if the connection to SAP backend was fast).

I was implementing ATC checks in the company I work for and wanted to find the place where the information about possible pseudo comments are stored. 

In transaction ATC I could find them in the management of priorities for check variants, but I couldn't find corresponding DB table. Seems that they are stored directly in the checks that's why after some debugging I've setup a break-point in the SCI transaction and then I've collected all the checks that have assigned pseudo comments. The version of NW that I was extracting pseudo comments from is 7.52 SP02.

Now you can also use this information as I've attached the whole table bellow, hopefully it will help you to find the correct pseudo comment if the code cannot be adjusted in your opinion.

I'm playing lately with TFS web services in ABAP and as I'm lazy guy I wanted to make my life a bit easier while working with the JSON results.

There is already a nice class /UI2/CL_JSON available which can deserialize JSON and also it can generate a dynamic structure from JSON file but at the end to make programming easier you need to create local or global structure that will be matching the structure of JSON. 

Instead of spending time on creating manually all needed types, I've decided to create a small report that will do the work for me. Once done it will serve for long time.

The prerequisites for this program is to have class /UI2/CL_JSON in latest version that have a method GENERATE in the first place. On the server in which I was developing this program I had to implement two SAPNotes (2526405 ,2629179) in order to get correct results from the mentioned method. Once done the rest was quite easy.

This time it will not be about ABAP but about the way how to extend the time between installation of new license for you NPL instance that is run using Virtualbox and OpenSuse. 

Normally it's not a big deal to instal the license, but if you don't use your instance for a while and in the meantime the license has expired, the before you can do anything you need to login to your instance with SAP* user and update the license in SLICENSE transaction. This sometimes makes me a bit nervous. That's why I've setup my installation this way, that the time between OpenSuse and Windows host is not synchronized. This makes that instead of 3 months between installing new license you can extend this time even to year or more. 

Below you can find the way and prerequisites that are needed to achieve this.

The ALV Grid hides inside itself possibility to use ASCII symbols. All you need to do is to mark the one of fields in field-catalog as symbol and then use constants defined in TYPE-POOL SYM in order to display one of them. The image bellow shows few of them, of course they are not that nice like the ICONS, there is also not many of them, but it's good to know that such symbols exists, although I so far I've not used them at work.

You may saw before the article Create XLSX/MHTML file from internal table in background and you may have use it without any issues before, but it seems that in newer releases of SAP (definitelly >= 7.50) this way makes corrupted XLSX files. 

So I've rechecked again how it is done in ALV grid in the new NW releases and I've updated the code, so now the issue with corrupted file is solved.

The mothod is simplified as much as possible at the moment, at the end all you must pass to a method is your internal table, but you can also pass sorting, filter and layout criteria using ALV grid structures.

The definition of the method should look like this:

    class-methods: create_xlsx_from_itab
      importing
                it_fieldcat      type lvc_t_fcat optional
                it_sort          type lvc_t_sort optional
                it_filt          type lvc_t_filt optional
                is_layout        type lvc_s_layo optional
                it_hyperlinks    type lvc_t_hype optional
        value(itdata) type standard table
      returning value(r_xstring) type xstring.

I'm big fan of CMD_EI_API and VMD_EI_API classes. I use them to create, update and delete customer and vendor master data, including contact persons, partners and all data you have in XD02/XK02 transaction. Also to update Z fields from all customer and vendor related tables. But lately after upgrade from 7.40 SP5 to 7.40 SP16 the method maintain_bapi was not saving the changes to the customers.

After a while I've found out that I have to call additionally the method update_modules and now the customer was saved.