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.

1.Why I’ve created the plug-in?

I was always missing a small functionality in Eclipse - a Favourite SAP T-Codes which we all know form SAP Menu. I know to you can call SMEN transaction using Alt+F8 but it does not fill the simplicity requirement. That's why I started to ask about the possibility to have favourite T-Codes view somewhere in ADT in Eclipse. I rather thought that Thomas, the product owner of ADT would say that they will implement this in one of next releases, but instead he encourage me to do it myself.

At first glance it was like WOW I hate Java, why I should do it myself when for the other it would take only some minutes, but then after few minutes I thought that this could be a really good exercise for myself to try to do something completely new in a language that is not my main programming language, or better said an a language which I don't use if I don't have to.  

Thomas gave me some really good starting points by giving links to the blogs from SCN. Additionally I've started to search the web for the eclipse plug-in developments so I could get some more information about it. It was hard time for me, I've stopped this few times until I said, no this cannot be that hard. You're supposed to be a cleaver guy so small plug-in in Java should not be that hard..... 

If you would ask me if I would write something about SAP Script then I would definitely answer "Hell no!". I hate SAP Script to be honest, it has for me only one advantage - speed of printout if you compare it to Adobe Forms, but the rest for me..... is against.

Today I faces a really strange behaviour of one of the invoice printouts, one of the fields which was showing the tax percentage, was showing wrong value if the print program was called for the second time.

The first output was OK, 8,00 % as value.

But when I directly show again the preview of the same invoice then, the value was changed to 0,80 %.

Bellow you can find the record of my session "Speed up your coding with ABAP in Eclipse"  at SAP Inside Track Wrocław 2017, which took place on 27th of May. During the session I was not able to cover whole topic although the session last 10 minutes longer than it should be, as I received lots of question during the session. 

I haven't watched whole video, I just checked if the voice was recorded correctly, so in case any problems with the video, please let me know.

Cheers
Łukasz

Dark theme is available in Eclipse since a long time, but there were many problems with easy setting of all colors in editors, windows and popups.

Sometimes you had to even adjust your system settings to be able to adjust some colors.

This discouraged many persons to switch to the dark side of eclipse.

But now there is a new hope for it! 

Darkest Dark Theme by Genuitec which can be found in eclipse marketplace hits the spot here. It's not only changing the background colors of editors and windows, but it's adjusting the color settings for fonts, it changes a lot of standard icons and the display of many elements of eclipse.

Personally I didn't like the color settings for ABAP, so I've used my old files which you can find in this article AiE (ADT) dark theme settings, but this is my personal opinion, so for you the default settings may looks ok. There is also one big added value for Darkest Dark Theme: during installation you get also icon editor which can be used to customise all icons in eclipse! Your changes after synchronisation with Genuitec accounts can be used as a default settings for Darkest Dark theme (of course they must be accepted by moderator firstly).

So how does it looks like now?

You'll spot the change directly on logon screen, where there is no white/grey background places anymore.

This time the problem which I solved was not an ABAP problem, although at the beginning I thought it is, as while creating of deliveries without reference in standard transaction were done correctly without any issues, then when I tried to do it in ABAP, I always received the error VL473 - Copying is not poss.because an entry is missing in Table TVCPL. 

I thought that this is some kind of nonsense as with standard t-code it was working correctly, so I tried several FM to create deliveries without reference but always with the same result as you can see on picture bellow. 

Then I did what I should do from beginning. I used where used function to display where TVCPL table is used and I found two views V_TVCPLAK and V_TVCPLAP.