This article appeared in the Apr May Jun 2006 issue of SAP Insider and appears here with

■ ■

permission from the publisher, Wellesley Information Services (WIS), www.WISpubs.com.

Regular Feature
New ABAP Editor
and Debugger Boost Under
Developers’ Productivity Development

Developers are increasingly making With all their new features, the
use of modeling in ABAP development latest versions of the ABAP Editor
tools — UI development tools based on and Debugger (available with SAP GUI
the Web Dynpro programming paradigm 6.40 patch level 10 for SAP NetWeaver
are good examples — to build programs 2004s) are generating quite a buzz —
without having to painstakingly write but don’t just take my word for it. Both
them line by line. Digging into the code, the ABAP Editor and Debugger won
though, is still the trickiest part of any first prize at the “SDN Jam Session”
application development, so it’s not demo competition at the 2005 SAP
surprising that the bulk of a developer’s TechEd conferences in both Vienna and Karl Kessler, SAP AG
time is spent with the ABAP Editor and Boston. To help show what the excitement
Debugger tools. Despite a selection of is all about, this article looks at the
model-driven programming tools, the new editing and debugging tools (see
typical ABAP developer probably spends Figure 1), and highlights some time- and manage even the most complex
as much as 95% of his time writing — saving features: development code
and reworking — code using the ABAP
■
Automated and customizable syntax ■
Code templates, dynamic content,
Editor and Debugger.
coloring, bookmarking, and collapsible and auto-correct options that “under-
Whenever your work relies so much code views to help better organize stand” what developers are coding
on any one tool, the addition of any new
time-saving feature will have some major
impact on productivity and speed up
projects significantly. Even from a more
user-oriented perspective, you shouldn’t
underestimate the power of a user-friendly
coding environment. It can make sitting
down at the computer to make last-minute
changes to your application to adapt to
new business requirements — or even
worse, to edit code you didn’t design on
your own — all the more bearable.1

1
For example, I admit that I didn’t like the early Java
development tools, as they were inherently slower than
typical Windows applications. But when Eclipse arrived
on the scene using Windows resources more or less
natively for Java development, I instantly became Figure 1 Some Sample Views of the New ABAP Editor and Debugger
enthusiastic. A cool development environment makes Environments
a big difference!

Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.

 and help programmers avoid
syntactical errors
■
More sophisticated, state-of-the-art
user interfaces, including split windows
and customized screens, to compare
different sections of a program and
speed development and debugging
To get a taste of the new ABAP
Editor and Debugger for yourself, simply
download the latest “Sneak Preview”
version of the ABAP application server
(based on SAP NetWeaver 2004s),
available on the SAP Developer Network
(SDN) at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/
downloads. This will give you some
experience with Web Dynpro ABAP in
conjunction with the new editor and
debugger, and even allows you to share
your findings in SDN forums. All the
screenshots and examples in this column
are taken from this demo version, so you
can use this article as a reference as you
explore the ABAP Editor and Debugger
on your own screen.
What’s New with the
ABAP Editor
A look at the ABAP Editor’s history
(see sidebar below) reflects how the
new editor is a real breakthrough in its
native ABAP support and its new level
of controls sophistication. From a tech-
nical standpoint, the new ABAP Editor,
like its predecessor, relies on ActiveX
controls technology. But this time, this
technology knows about ABAP syntax
and can better predict and support the
ABAP developer’s actions.2
Like previous versions of the ABAP
Editor, the new editor is tightly inte-
grated into the classic Workbench tools,
meaning all the familiar server-side
features — such as activation, global
2
The control implementation is independent of the
ABAP syntax bindings. As a consequence, it is also
used in other tools that require a different syntax,
such as eCATT.

A Brief History of the ABAP Editor

The new editor is a real breakthrough in its native ABAP
support. Some of the limitations of earlier versions of the
ABAP Editor can be better understood by taking a quick
look back at how the ABAP Editor has evolved.
Early ABAP Editors
The first application ever developed for SAP R/3 was the
ABAP Editor. After R/3 Basis was developed in the late
1980s, SAP needed a strong programming environment
based on UNIX and relational database technology for its
new release. Two projects were launched: one based on C
programming and another developed in ABAP on the R/2
platform. Since R/2 ABAP was more or less identical to
R/3 ABAP back then, it’s not surprising that the ABAP-
based solution was available first, and thus has become the
commonly used solution. The reason was simple: Even slight
changes in C always required a recompile and redeploy on
the various UNIX workstations (i.e., installation of a new
local GUI), whereas the ABAP-based editor was stored in
database tables and therefore, due to ABAP’s server-side
nature, was immediately available to all developers.
A Block-Editing and Tables-Based Approach
This distribution and self-compiling feature of the ABAP
Editor (and, in fact, all ABAP programs) helped to set up
a rather stable environment in the early SAP R/3 days,
which was key to its success. However, the ABAP-centric
design also had its price: Its dialog characteristics reflected
a “block mode” editing environment. Users coming from
an IBM environment felt comfortable with this, since the
ABAP Editor shared many features of editors that are
available on an IBM host, including the “block” on the left
side of the editor interface where you insert line commands
to copy, move, or delete lines. Developers who were used to
UNIX or Windows, however, were expecting other types of
tools; Windows users, for example, expected a new line
when they hit “enter,” while mainframe users expected data
to be transferred in block mode to the host. To address this,
the ABAP Editor offered a “PC mode” that supported a
Windows approach. From an implementation perspective,
the ABAP Editor continued to use table controls — again,
emphasizing handling of tabular data rather than code lines.
Incorporating ActiveX Controls
The next innovation was triggered with SAP GUI’s support
of OLE, which allowed developers to embed native ActiveX
controls capable of sophisticated frontend features such as
drag and drop, local search and replace, local scrolling,
local printing, and support for keyboard accelerators. This
innovation was also reflected in the ABAP Editor, with a
control-based editor plus backend features like syntax
check and Workbench navigation (including the now indis-
pensable double-click that allows developers to jump from
the code directly to the definition of a structure or field).
This ActiveX approach was a major step forward. Since
it was being incorporated into a text editor-based approach,
however, the ActiveX control-based editor was not aware of
the ABAP syntax. Features that had become popular in
Visual Basic programming, such as syntax coloring, could
not be supported directly. This is where the new ABAP
Editor comes into play.

Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.

search, navigation to other tools, proper
embedding into all major tools like
class and function builder — are still
fully available.
To get started with the new editor,
simply switch on the “Front-End Editor
(New)” preference setting (as shown on
the left screen in Figure 2) and log on
as usual to the ABAP Editor. You’ll also
be able to set yourself up to use the new
debugger in the Workbench settings,
under the “Debugging” tab.

The New Look of the ABAP Editor

Figure 3 reveals the new ABAP Editor.
Compare this to earlier versions — the
only thing that looks familiar is the
actual ABAP code!

The most obvious change is all the Figure 2 Switching On the New ABAP Editor and Debugger Tools
color; automated syntax highlighting
color-codes different syntactical
elements. Keywords, such as DATA
and CHECK, are shown in blue; string
constants are green; custom code is
in black; and comments are italicized —
and all of these can be customized,
which I’ll explain in the next section.

There are other features that devel-

opers will welcome:
■
In the leftmost column of the editor
screen, developers can insert symbols,
such as breakpoints, to indicate stop-
ping points throughout the program —
there was no way to display these
control icons in the previous version
of the editor
■
To indicate newly added or changed
code, triangles appear to the right of
the corresponding line numbers where
code has been edited
■
Numbered bookmarks can be easily
inserted and manipulated using a
context menu to more flexibly
navigate to important points within
your program
Customization Options
The ABAP Editor’s color and style
assignments are certainly not fixed. If
Click to access
the Options menu
and customize
your settings
Figure 3 New ABAP Editor Features Include Syntax Coloring, Line
Numbering, Bookmarks, and Breakpoints
you prefer alternate colors and shading, display, including errors and breakpoints.
you can customize the editor by simply Other customization features include
clicking the customize button in the the ability to:
lower right corner of the main ABAP
Editor window, which brings you to the
■
Set auto-correction options for
Options menu. Figure 4 on the next page frequently occurring misspellings
shows the various customization options, ■
Establish rules for “pretty printing,”
which include changing the color for including indentation settings
breakpoints (in this case, setting it to
dark red). Here you can also change ■
Format code using font, color, word-
the various types of items you can wrapping styles, etc.

Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.

Split Screens for Easier Maintenance
Clicking the split bar button at the top
right of the main ABAP Editor screen
allows you to see two views of the same
program, as shown in Figure 5. This split
view helps you maintain related parts of a
program within the same window — for
example, you can program data defini-
tions and the affected sections of code in
parallel — instead of having to open a
second SAP GUI window to do so.

Clearer Views of Even the Most

Complex Programs
Another outstanding feature of the
new code editor is its support for
outlining syntactical structures such Figure 4 Customizing the ABAP Editor Through the Options Menu
as CASE…ENDCASE and METHOD…
ENDMETHOD (see Figure 6). With the
“+” and “-” buttons, you can easily
collapse and expand the body of syntac-
tical structures within your code, and
therefore better follow the inner structure
of your programs by hiding details that
are currently out of scope.

Features to Make Development

More Efficient
Code templates are a powerful means to
abstract recurring syntactical patterns.
With templates at hand, the system can
provide hints — while you enter code —
that a template is available. For example,
if you type the keyword “select,” the
system will automatically suggest to
use the code template for “select.” If
you simply press CTRL+ENTER, the
suggested template will be inserted.
(Misspellings can be corrected on the
fly in the same way.)
The new ABAP Editor comes with a
large selection of common, predefined
template patterns (such as FORM…
ENDFORM). But you can also define
custom templates on your own, helping
enforce customized programming guide-
lines and the like.
Figure 7 shows the template editor,
which is integrated within the customizing
dialog in the Options menu. The template
mechanisms also allow you to insert
Figure 5 Split View Eases Program Maintenance
dynamic fields (such as date/time) and
integrate dialog input (such as the form
name) to provide fully flexible templates.
Additional Editing Features
Other features that have been enhanced
for the new ABAP Editor include:
■
Extended dialogs for find and replace
■
A clipboard that holds code fragments
cut during your editing session
■
Capabilities to print and export code
snippets or full programs in multiple
formats (HTML, PDF, etc.) for
sharing code in SDN, for example
I could go on for quite some time
about additional new editing capabilities,
but let’s press on to look at the features
of the new ABAP Debugger. As you
explore the new debugger, note that the
new features of the ABAP Editor are
fully integrated into the debugging tool,
and vice versa. Now communication
between the two tools is seamless.
Exploring the Features of
the New Debugger
The debugger has recently gone
through significant architectural
changes and includes new features

Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.


Figure 6 Collapsing and Expanding Code Sections for a Clearer View of
Program Structure
Figure 7 Defining and Editing Code Templates from the Options Menu
that developers will see and benefit
from immediately.
In the past, debugger screens were
viewed as part of the screen flow of a
transaction whenever some breakpoint
or watchpoint condition was met. The
advantage of this approach was its
speed: I have never seen a debugging
environment come up that fast. While
other debuggers typically appear, slowly
initialize the debug environment, and
load a lot of symbolic information, the
classic ABAP Debugger screens displayed
immediately since the debugger was part
of the ABAP runtime environment.
On the other hand, the debugger was
limited from a user-interface perspective.
The debugger’s UI control was imple-
mented inside one work process in the
kernel, meaning that the debugger and
the process being debugged ran in the
same internal session. For the user, this
meant that the classic debugger appeared
in the same SAP GUI window as the
application being debugged — which
was often confusing. From a technical
Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.
point of view, this meant that the debugger
shared its context data with the applica-
tion being debugged, and vice versa.3
These limitations of the classic
debugger are solved by a two-process
architecture in the new ABAP Debugger,
where the debugger and the debugged
transaction run in cleanly separated
external modes using different windows
that communicate with each other. All
debug controls, such as “single step” and
“continue until next breakpoint,” are
now done in separate windows, while
the debugged transaction runs in its
own window. When a debug condition
is met (for example, when the program
hits a breakpoint in the code), then the
debugger window is ready for input
and links back to the original program.
The transaction window is blocked
until program execution is resumed in
the debugger and the next screen is
displayed in the transaction window.4
This “new” architecture is not
completely new — it was first introduced
in SAP Web Application Server 6.40.
But with this architecture come lots of
new features for the ABAP Debugger,
including advanced user interface control.
A More Sophisticated Look and Feel
Like its classic counterpart, the new
debugger explicitly comes up when you
enter “/h” in the command field of any
application. Figure 8 on the next page
shows the main window of the new
debugger. Note the differences. With the
new debugging architecture, the brand-new
ABAP Editor control is used, bringing
the latest features (such as syntax high-
lighting) right into your debugging envi-
ronment. On the right side of the screen,
you see the variables display. I picked a
3
An ABAP-based implementation was not possible, as
the debugger and the debugged transaction ran in the
same internal mode, causing interference between
debugger and “debuggee.”
4
For more details on how the new debugger works, see
“Introducing the next generation of ABAP debugging
— the New ABAP Debugger” by Boris Gebhardt and
Christoph Stöck in the January-February 2006 issue
of SAP Professional Journal (www.sappro.com).
couple of variables from the running
transaction with the traditional double-
click, but you can also easily hover over
the code and a transient window pops up,
immediately showing the variable’s value.
Customization Options to Tailor
Debugger Desktops to User
Preferences
Another major difference is the way the
new debugger lets the user configure
desktops to his needs and switch to
Figure 8 The New Look of the ABAP Debugger User Interface
Figure 9 Customized Desktop Comparing Two Tables in the New
ABAP Debugger
specialized desktops for certain debug-
ging tasks. Each desktop is a collection
of tools that you can easily customize.
For example, if you want to control
the flow of execution and display two
internal tables simultaneously, you can
open the tool dialog and select the
appropriate tools. I selected the table tool
twice; the result is shown in Figure 9.
With the two internal tables displayed
side by side, it is now fairly easy to find
and correct errors.
Variables display
Subscribe today. Visit www.SAPinsider.com.
Other Debugging Features
The debugger offers a variety of addi-
tional tools, including a Diff tool to
compare variables or internal tables in
parallel and a tool to display the inner
structure of objects, as well as special
features including stack display, an
overview of breakpoints, the capability to
set watchpoints, and more. You can also
transfer the actual parameter of a func-
tion module call into the test environ-
ment for function modules.
A complete discussion of all the new
features is certainly beyond the scope
of this column. Again I invite you to test
drive the 2004s download, available
from SDN at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/
sdn/downloads.
Summary
All the buzz around the new ABAP
Editor and Debugger is well deserved.
The new features and design of the
ABAP Editor and Debugger better
understand the syntactical elements
of the language, greatly enhancing
the productivity of your ABAP develop-
ment teams. As always, the tools
are integrated into the familiar
environment of an ABAP Workbench.
But unlike earlier versions, the tools
are now integrated with each other —
the new editing environment is fully
reflected in the debugging environment,
and vice versa. What’s more, the tools
also offer many new customization
capabilities to personalize each user’s
designtime and runtime environment.
This is cool, time-saving stuff for
ABAP developers!
Karl Kessler joined SAP in 1992. He is the
Product Manager of the SAP NetWeaver
foundation, which includes SAP NetWeaver
Application Server, Web Dynpro, ABAP
Workbench, and SAP NetWeaver Developer
Studio, and is responsible for all rollout
activities. You can reach him via email
at karl.kessler@sap.com.