The difference between a normal programmer and a good programmer is, the latter keeps his/her basics right. Good programmers are distinguished by the quality of their deliverables. They provide enough documentation in their object so that the future practitioners supporting their product do not curse them. One of my Team Lead once told me, “your code should not only meet the functionalities, it should also be asthetically pleasing if someone happens to peep into it"

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Are you an ABAP coder or a
programmer?
TOPICS: ABAP Checklist Good Programming Practice
Guidelines
POSTED BY: SAP YARD OCTOBER 16, 2014
The difference between a normal programmer and a
good programmer is, the latter keeps his/her basics
right. Good programmers are distinguished by the
quality of their deliverables. They provide enough
documentation in their object so that the future
practitioners supporting their product do not curse
them. One of my Team Lead once told me, “your code
should not only meet the functionalities, it should also be
asthetically pleasing if someone happens to peep into it“.
Today, in this post I do not want to bore you with the
“Gyan” (Sanskrit word that roughly translates to
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“sermons/preachings”). But, I would like to provide a
list of simple checks which every programmer should
remember even in their sleep…
Note: Numbers are only for bullet marker. It does not
rate one higher to next. Every point has different
weightage in different scenarios.
1) Define your variables with meaningful names (eg:
instead of v_var1; v_material is more meaningful).
Provide as much documentations/halfline comments
as possible. Align your code and demarcate your
blocks. Provide uniform spacing in between different
units and remove dead codes. Clean code would
reflect your personality..
2) In the AT SELECTION-SCREEN event, use UP TO 1
ROWS (or count( * ) UP TO 1 ROWS) in the SELECT
statement used for validating the data since the idea
is just to ensure that at least 1 row will be considered
for processing in the main selection event.
3) Internal table is defined with “TYPE
STANDARD/SORTED/HASHED TABLE OF” “INITIAL
SIZE 0″ and work area is used instead of tables with
HEADER LINES. If you have multiple internal tables
of same type, you need not always define as many
work areas. Same work area should be used across
multiple internal tables, if they are of same type.
4) Declare global internal tables only if they are
expected to be used globally (across multiple
subroutines) in the program. This is to avoid
unnecessary memory usage as local internal tables are
cleared from the memory on exiting the subroutine.
5) Wild cards like ‘A%’ should be avoided as much as
possible.
6) Always SELECT INTO internal table, except when
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the table will be very large, use “UP TO N Rows” when
the number of records needed is known.
7) Use “JIT”, Just In Time concept to select data when
needed, use them and free them. Most programmers
have the habit of selecting all the tables one by one
first and then processing/massaging them later at the
end. This practice burdens the system by unnecessary
memory consumption by holding the data when they
are not needed. SELECTs should be done when
needed and FREE/REFRESH the tables as soon as it is
used and not needed afterwards.
8) SORT fields and SORT Order on the SORT
statement should be mentioned explicitly (e.g. SORT
ITAB BY FLD1 ASCENDING FLD2 DESCENDING).
9) HASHED table is used for processing large amount
of data (provided that you access single records only,
and all with a fully specified key).
10) DELETE or SORT is not used on a HASHED table
since it increases memory consumption.
11) Fields specified in the WHERE condition with the
critical operators NOT and <> (negative SQL
statements) cannot be used for a search using
database indexes. Whenever possible formulate SQL
statements positively. Avoid negation statements.
12) When IF or CASE, testing conditions are nested so
that the most frequently true conditions are
processed first. Also CASE is used instead of IF when
testing multiple fields “equal to” something.
13) READ TABLE INTO WORKAREA should be used
instead of only READ TABLE. If INTO work area is not
needed then, use the addition TRANSPORTING NO
FIELDS if the purpose of the read statement is only to
check the existence of the record in that table.

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14) For copying internal tables use ‘=’ operator
instead of LOOPing and appending. SORT inside a
LOOP should be avoided.
15) Do not delete the records of internal table inside
the LOOP — ENDLOOP. Instead mark the rows to be
deleted by passing some identifier to the row field(s)
and delete all those identified after the end of LOOP.
Use Field Symbol, if you want to modify the fields of a
table in the LOOP. Usage of field symbol would avoid
modify statement inside the LOOP.
16) Use CONTROL BREAKS in the LOOP — ENDLOOP
syntax to avoid repeated reading of other internal
tables and for summarizing / updating the internal
tables.
17) DELETE ADJACENT DUPLICATES entries from
internal table before selection from database table
using “ FOR ALL ENTRIES” statement. Applicable
only in those cases where the table can possibly have
duplicate entries.
18) Nested SELECT should not be used instead,
“INNER JOIN” and/or “FAE” should be used. “FAE” is
to be used over “LOOP at ITAB / SELECT /
ENDLOOP”.
19) In SELECT statement, only the required fields
should be selected from the database
table/structure/view. While using FOR ALL ENTRIES,
make sure to SELECT all the primary keys even if you
do not need some of them later as FAE retrieves
unique result set. For selecting single row from a
database table, “SELECT UP TO 1 ROWS” is used
(when you do not have full primary key for your
WHERE clause). Always CHECK that the internal table
used in FOR ALL ENTRIES is NOT empty. “SELECT
SINGLE” is used only when full primary key
combination is known. Avoid SELECT * as much as

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possible.
20) When creating JOINs over database tables there
should be an index at least on the inner table for the
fields in the JOIN condition else use “ FOR ALL
ENTRIES” SELECT statement. Ensure that the inner
join uses the correct indexes.
21) SORT internal table by fields in the correct order,
which are used in a READ TABLE statement using
BINARY SEARCH. If the order of SORTING is invalid,
the BINARY SEARCH will never work. And you would
be scratching your head for a long time to find the
root cause if you need to do dry run where issues
could be replicated..
22) Avoid MODIFY, use explicit INSERT or UPDATE;
it is better for performance and support. MODIFY
statement is more attractive to programmers because
of the ease of usage. But, believe me, splitting your
table entries to INSERT and UPDATE is still better,
even though it might need one more select
statements. Tried and Tested in real projects.
23) For large internal tables where only some rows are
to be processed, use SORT and then the READ TABLE
command is used to set index to first relevant row
before LOOPing from that index. Use CHECK or IF…
EXIT…ENDIF as appropriate to exit from the loop.
Also called, Parallel Cursor technique.
24) SORTed table is used for range accesses involving
table key or index accesses. SORTed tables are
particularly useful in nested loop processing. LOOP
AT ITAB with a WHERE condition is preferred where
ITAB is a SORTED table (instead of STANDARD or
HASHED internal table) and the fields used in the
WHERE condition are the non-unique key fields of the
sorted table.

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25) Use indexed table like VAPMA instead of VBAP to
identify sales orders for a particular MATNR (i.e in
situations when you have material and you do not
have VBELN (sales order number) in hand). Similarly
VAKPA etc. VBFA is used for forward search i.e.
preceding to subsequent. For subsequent to preceding
we should use alternate tables such as LIPS or VBRP
(VBGEL, VGPOS). Try to use Views instead of joining
multiple tables.
26) Run Code Inspector and Extended syntax checks
with character literals checkbox switched on to rectify
all relevant errors and warnings. SAP has provided
this cool feature, please use it. Proudly flaunt the
results with zero/ignorable warnings.
27) Use transaction code SCI/SCII to do the sanity
check of your deliverables before passing it to the
quality reviewers. Easy way to impress your reviewer.
28) Use transaction code ST05/ST12 to trace your
code. Make sure to check what indices your database
accesses are using. Check these indices against your
“WHERE” clause to assure they are significant. Check
other indices for this table and where you have to
change your “WHERE” clause to use it. Create new
indices if necessary after consulting your Basis team.
For client dependant tables, use MANDT as the first
field in the secondary index since it is internally
considered by SAP when retrieving the data from the
database tables.
Please note, this article is not intended for Performance
Tuning. This is an effort to remind the programmers
about the simple checks which we should take care as
part of good programming practice. Please feel free to
suggest if you think something is missing. We would be
happy to add them in this list.

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2 COMMENTS
ON "ARE YOU AN ABAP CODER OR A PROGRAMMER?"
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Great staff, thanks a lot
Dear William – Thank you
so much for your feedback.. Glad that
you like it.
Regards,
SAPYard.
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Mutero william | July 30, 2015 at 12:50
pm | Reply
SAP Yard | July 30, 2015 at 1:41
pm | Reply

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