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Next level ABAP

Development: Creating
efficient code
Sandor van der Neut
TECHNOLOGIE
ABAP
 
CODE EFFICIENCY
 
CONSTRUCTOR EXPRESSIONS
The technical innovations in the SAP world are following each other in rapid succession.
It should therefore not come as a surprise that even our trusty ABAP language is not left
untouched. A lot of new cool features have been introduced in the ABAP 7.40 release
which has been around for quite some time now and with the upcoming 7.50 release
even more ammunition can be added to your ABAP arsenal. Being an ABAP developer
myself I find it important to keep track of these innovations so that I can benefit from the
new possibilities they give me and allow me to create more efficient code in the
process. In this blog I will first give you some practical examples of the new possibilities
in the ABAP 7.40 release which I use daily and make my life as an ABAP developer a
lot easier. In the second part I will dive deeper into some of the new features of the
ABAP 7.50 release and give some practical examples of how they can be applied.

ABAP Features for Release 7.40

The ABAP release 7.40 is around for some time now and as an ABAP developer it is
bound to cross your path sooner or later. In this first part of my blog I want to focus on
the practical use of the new features available in the ABAP 7.40 release that allow you
to write more compact and efficient code. In this blog I will not try to cover all the new
features introduced in the ABAP 7.40 release as it will actually take several blogs to
cover it completely. I will start right away with some examples, but if you want some
more background information I recommend you to check the following links:
ABAP News for Release 7.40 – What is ABAP 7.40?  
SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.4 – Overview and Product Highlights

Inline Declarations
I would like to start with the inline declarations which is one of the major changes
introduced in release 7.40. Inline declarations are a new way of declaring variables and
field symbols at operand positions in your ABAP statements. By using the new
declaration operator DATA(…) or FIELD-SYMBOL(…) you can declare your variables
on the fly and it will speed up your development significantly as you don’t have to
specifically type all your variables. It can be used in a lot of different circumstances of
which some are shown in the examples below.

Simple assignment of a left hand side variable. In this example we use a string template
on the right hand side so the variable LV_PARAMETER will be of type STRING.

Declaration of work areas / field symbols in loops or other internal table operations. In
the example below de variable LS_MESSAGE will be of the line type of the internal
table LT_MESSAGE_TABLE (you could have used the ASSIGNING FIELD-
SYMBOL(…) here as well!)

Declaration of reference variables. As you can see in the BOL programming example
below the inline declaration works for reference variables as well. In this example the
variable LR_CAMPAIGN_DATES will hold an instance of class CL_CRM_BOL_ENTITY

It may at first glance seem like a small improvement but once you start using this
feature (especially in combination with the other new features) you will see the benefits
and you will use it all the time. There is however a small price to pay, in the last
example above you will lose the possibility to directly navigate to underlying classes by
double clicking on the variables.

Constructor Expressions
Another useful feature introduced in the ABAP 7.40 release are the constructor
expressions.

SAP defines them as follows:

“A constructor expression consists of a predefined constructor operator, a data type or

object type that matches the operator and that can be derived implicitly from the
operand position using #, and type-specified parameters specified in parentheses. Each
constructor expression creates a result whose data type is determined using the
specified type. The parameters specified in parentheses are used to pass input values”

Rather cryptic right But I will try to clear things up in the examples below. Currently the
following constructor operators exist:

 The instance operator NEW 

 The value operator VALUE 
 The conversion operator CONV 
 The casting operator CAST 
 The reference operator REF 
 The component operator CORRESPONDING 
 The lossless operator EXACT 
 The reduction operator REDUCE 
 The filter operator FILTER 
 The conditional operators COND and SWITCH

All of the constructor operators mentioned above have their benefits but I will highlight
some of them I find particularly useful or interesting in the examples below.

The instance operator NEW

I often use the NEW constructor operator as it gives me, in combination with the inline
declaration functionality, a quick and easy way to instantiate classes. Nothing
spectacular but convenient nonetheless.

The value operator VALUE

I’m also a big fan of the VALUE constructor operator as it allows me to quickly fill
internal table structures without excessive use of data declarations and using work
areas and such. In the example below there is a quick and clean way to add an
additional button to a WebUI component.
You can also use it to build more complex nested tables as shown in the example below
where I fill the input fields table for the famous CRM_ORDER_MAINTAIN function
module in one compact statement. It is also convenient that the new constructor
expressions combine nicely with the inline declarations (I bet that’s not a coincidence)

The filter operator FILTER

The filter operator does what its name suggests it filters the content of an internal table.
As a prerequisite, the filtered table must have a sorted or a hash key (primary or
secondary), that is evaluated behind the WHERE clause. I have to admit that I don’t use
this option not very often but I wanted to show it here anyway. In the example below the
internal table LT_FILTERED will contain only the entries that match with a certain
partner function.

The casting operator CAST

The casting operator is a constructor operator that executes an up or a down cast for
reference variables with the type specified. Again not a statement I use very often but
you will encounter it now and then and this is one of the statements that you have to
look over twice before you see what is going on. In the example below I use an up cast
twice and again the results can be conveniently combined with inline data declarations.

The conditional operators COND and SWITCH  

COND and SWITCH are so called Constructor operators. Constructor operators are
used in constructor expressions to create a result that can be used at operand
positions. The COND statement I use a lot and it constructs a result of the specified
type based on logical expression. In the example below I determine a process type
(Delete, Update or Insert) based on certain conditions. The result is variable
LV_PROCESS of type string.

The SWITCH operator is closely related to the COND operator but it works not with a
logical expression but with a case differentiation. The COND and the SWITCH operator
can also be used to assign a value to an input parameter of a method. In the example
below I read an OTR text based on the language present in the variable
MYLANGUAGE which is actually pretty cool.
Also note that if you are tired of only catching exceptions you can throw exceptions now!

Table Expressions
In ABAP release 7.40 the new table expression itab[…] is introduced and enables you
to access internal table data and it can be used to replace the good old READ TABLE
statement. In the diagram below I will explain its use by comparing the new itab[…]
statement with the old READ TABLE statement

At first glance it seems that the itab[…] is just doing the same as the READ TABLE
statement so why introduce it. But there are some differences.

With the ITAB[…] statement you have the possibility to chain the table expressions and
this allows you to pinpoint directly to a certain record or even a single field in complex
nested table structures. A nice example can be found here.

Another differences is that if a table line is not found, the exception

CX_SY_ITAB_LINE_NOT_FOUND is raised and if you don’t catch this exception a
short dump will occur. So you can’t check for sy-subrc.

I do use table expressions regularly because it saves you a lot of coding to achieve
certain goals while working with internal tables in ABAP. This is best illustrated in the
example below.
String templates (and embedded expressions)
Technically speaking string templates were first introduced with ABAP release 7.31 and
allow you to do a whole range of useful string operations. If you want to see its full
potential I would recommend you take a look at the ABAP program
DEMO_EXPRESSIONS which gives a nice overview of all the available possibilities.
The result of a string operation is however always a character string and it can be used
directly as input in method calls with character based input fields. In the example below
we pass a variable which is defined as type P with two decimals to a character based
input variable. Without the curly brackets this will never activate let alone run, wrapping
it in a string template we have no issues at all.

We can also add some additional formatting.

And you can even extend it further and place the result of another method call directly in
the string template and combine it with some embedded expressions and pass it on as
input. No problem at all.

Of course these examples are making no sense at all but syntactically they are correct
and activating them is giving no errors whatsoever. It does however show the power of
using string templates and it is yet another way to make your coding more structured
and compact and that is why I like using them.

ABAP Features for Release 7.50

Now that we have had an impression of the possibilities of the 7.40 release it is time to
move on to the latest ABAP 7.50 release which is the underlying ABAP platform for the
SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition, SAP Business Suite Enhancement Package 8 and
SAP Business Warehouse 7.5. If it will find its way to other SAP products such as for
example CRM on premise is not clear at the moment. But time will tell.

For more detailed information about SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP 7.5 this landing
page is probably a good place to start.

In this second part of this blog I want to focus again on the practical application of some
of the new features of this ABAP release and provide examples that will give you an
idea what you might expect.

Is instance of
The first interesting addition is the new relational expression ‘IS INSTANCE OF’ which
allows you to check whether a reference variable of a given static type is pointing to a
certain object.

I can imagine that it is something I will use. In the example below a check is done to
determine if variable PARAM is a table, a structure or referring to a data element.
You can also use a similar approach in a CASE like construction as shown below where
I try to determine what kind of context node we are dealing with in a WebUI scenario.

If you wanted to achieve something similar before the 7.50 release you had to use a
casting operation inside a TRY …. ENDTRY construction.

Corresponding
The next feature is nice but I don’t see it as something I will user very often. In ABAP
release 7.40 a new constructor operator CORRESPONDING was introduced that allows
an explicit mapping of structure components with different names. Something that
wasn’t possible with the classic MOVE-CORRESPONDING statement. In release 7.50 a
new system class CL_ABAP_CORRESPONDING has been introduced which makes it
possible to assign components of structures or internal tables with dynamically specified
mapping rules.

As I said before this isn’t something I see myself use very much, but there might be
some circumstances that it will be useful. There are some nice examples in the
standard SAP help you can find here.

Host and Other Expressions in Open SQL

In ABAP release 7.40 (SP05) a new foundation for Open SQL was laid by introducing a
new SQL parser into the ABAP runtime environment. In fact the role of Open SQL in the
ABAP framework has changed as is explained in detail in this excellent blog. It will go
too far to explain all new Open SQL features here but I want to show some examples of
what new features are introduced in ABAP release 7.50. Starting with host expressions,
Host expressions are ABAP expressions that can be specified in operand positions in
Open SQL.This really opens up a lot of possibilities you never had before. For a
complete list of operand positions for host expressions I like to point to the ABAP
Keyword Documentation on this subject.

In the example below a table expression is evaluated as a host expression on the right
side of a where condition. The result is then used for the comparison with the column
specified on the left side.

The previous example I copied from the SAP Help but to show you the flexibility of host
expressions I came up with an example of my own where the host expression is
introduced in the UP TO n ROWS statement using the switch conditional operator. As
you can see the sky is the limit!

Beside host expressions it also possible the use a wide variety of SQL expressions now
in Open SQL. For example an arithmetic expression on the left hand side of a WHERE
condition.

But you can introduce a lot more complexity using SQL expressions. For a complete
overview I would like to refer to the standard SAP documentation which is full of
comprehensible examples.

Conclusions
In general, working with the new possibilities in ABAP will allow you to create more
efficient code with less effort. When you start working with the new features you will see
that getting used to them almost comes naturally and before you know it they will
become a second nature to you. As far as I can see there is only one possible drawback
of all the possibilities that are available and how they interact with each other. You can
make your code unnecessary complex. Maybe you can remember the moment when
Spiderman was told by his uncle: “With great power, comes great responsibility”. This
actually might apply to the modern ABAP developer as well, because with all
possibilities SAP is providing, in combination with chaining options and the possibility of
adding code at operand positions, there lurks the danger that your code
becomes obfuscating. If you don’t know what that means the examples below might
give you a clue.

In the end, it is up to you to choose where to use inline declarations, constructor

expressions and so on. If it is important to keep the code readable and debuggable, feel
free to use some more code than strictly required… Or try using comments in the
coding. That still works. :-).

Setting up your own trial environment

I can imagine you have become excited about the new possibilities of both the ABAP
7.40 and the 7.50 release and that you can’t wait to get some hands-on experience
yourself. Luckily there is a trial environment readily available in the SAP Cloud
Appliance Library which can be set up quite easily. All you need is an S-user and a
credit card because the services is, however very cheap, not entirely free of charge.
The link below will take you directly to the page where you can set up your own
environment.

SAP NetWeaver 7.50 SP1 AS ABAP and SAP BW on SAP HANA[Developer Edition]

How to Guide
References

SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.4 – Overview and Product Highlights 

ABAP Language News for Release 7.40 
ABAP 7.40 Quick Reference 
SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP 7.5 – Overview 
SAP NetWeaver AS for ABAP 7.5  – One ABAP Platform for SAP Business Suite and
SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 
ABAP Language News for Release 7.50 
Developer & Trial Editions: SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP and SAP
Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA