I was thinking about writing a book about ALV Grid for a long time, but there was always an excuse to not to do it. One of the biggest was that SAP is now strongly advertising Fiori and UI5 as the next generation of UI in SAP world and I was thinking about when SAP will kill old ALVs. This so far didn’t happened and as there are dozens of ABAP developers who still creates reports and transactions inside the ERP systems using the good old ALV Grid, I’ve decided to finally do it. Personally I don’t see how expert users could easily switch to Fiori or UI5 apps, especially that I haven’t seen so far an editable grid or table there. But maybe I’m just blind. 

Personally I’d prefer that SAP would create new controls that would look like the one you can get in every Windows or iOS applications, which you can easily add via drag & drop in screen editor. But probably this will not happen soon, maybe even never. That’s why it’s really important to get an idea what you can do with the controls that are already available in SAP. In this tutorial I will try to show you what you can do with ALV Grid. If possible I will give you an example for each functionality, so you could really understand it easily. It will not be a story, it will be a journey through the good old ABAP days. It will not be easy to read, as this will be in most parts a technical description of possibilities that ALV Grid gives you, but I hope it will help you in your daily job. 

If you know CMD_EI_API class, you are aware of its power. It's very helpful for the manipulation of customer master data, all master data including contacts. I have played with this class many times and although I got use to the structure of it, I thought one day that it would be handy to have a wrapper or framework to use it. So I've started to build it.

As a result I have now more handy (but not perfect) class to handle the creation or update of customer master data with CMD_EI_API=>MAINTAIN_BAPI method.

The whole source code is available as current version on Github, from where you can instal this class (and all supporting ones) with abapGit https://github.com/fidley/Customers. 

As there is no much documentation about this class yet, I will extend this article in future with more details, for now just the basics information how to start with it. 

I've started some time ago a journey with SAP Fiori and first Fiori apps. It was not that smooth as I've expected, but now with experience received during that period I feel more and more comfortable with it. That's why when I've heard that I need to create an simple app in Fiori to create new incident in our helpdesk system. 

Normally it looks very simple both from backend and UI point of view, but the issue was that I had to make the possible to use the app without the logon to SAP.

SSO is not possible yet in my company so I've setup the SICF node of the application to use specific credentials for logon, and here the surprise started :) 

 HTTP request failed403,,CSRF token validation failed error appear when I was calling oModel.create method......

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.