Dynamic assign

[Former Member]

Hi,

what do you think about this topic, and about this code:

FIELD-SYMBOLS: <fs_buptab> TYPE ANY TABLE.
DATA: varname(20) TYPE c VALUE '(SAPMF05A)BUPTAB[]'.

* table from program SAPMF05A is here and ready to change,
* read.....
ASSIGN (varname) TO <fs_buptab>.
IF sy-subrc NE 0.
  MESSAGE e999(zdevel) WITH 'FIELD SYMBOL ASSIGNMENT ERROR'.
ENDIF.

I have heard, that SAP will not support this in the future?

thx

Mario

[Former Member]

Hai,

As far as the developments seen till now,SAP does not stop a particular functionality all of a sudden.First it will make it obsolete and later on will think of avoiding it.As a thumb rule we can say SAP is downward compatable. From my experience I could run programs copied from 3.1H versions in 4.7.Some codes may be obsolete i.e. they give an extended check error thats all.But the fuctionality will be perfectly the same.

So I don't think you have to fear about this as field-symbols are not obsolete yet.As far as I am concerned it will be there in release 5 also which will be released very soon (most probably end of this month).

Cheers

Binoo

[Former Member]

Hi Mario,

FYI - We are using this technique on an ECC 5.0 system with no problems (the blog Sanjay is talking about /people/brad.williams/blog/2005/04/25/userexits--how-do-i-access-inaccessible-data came from me :-).

As ECC runs on WAS 6.4 I wouldn't expect that this approach will stop working anytime soon.

I guess the risk is yours, but as often the alternative is a modification, I think this is the cleanest way to get at the data you need.

Cheers,

Brad

[Former Member]

Hi Mario,

We are also using this technology and who knows whether SAP will stop supporting this . But even if they stop that will be on a new version/ release . We have this on our production system . So when we upgrade we have to keep this in mind.

But let me tell you SAP says that this is for internal use and they use it in functions DYNP_VALUES_READ , DYNP_VALUES_UPDATE. TEXT_SYMBOL_REPLACE and these functions are allowed by customers to use in custom programs . So even if they stop it there will be a work around as somewhere in the memory data will be there which you can read.

Cheers

[Former Member]

Hi Sanjay Sinha,

exactly, that was my point. I thought also, SAP shold change something...:-)). I'm aware that, this isn't nice coding, it is complex to understand how some things work, why has this field changed, but one big BUT - it helps in case of almost all user-exits, BADis, instead of modifications of standard SAP.

Mario

[Former Member]

Hi Mario,

Yes agree and due to the big BUT only we are using it .

Let us wait and see if SAP stops supporting it . We can always find out what new method they use in TEXT_SYMBOL_REPLACE or other functions and replicate that . It's not that we are using some data outside the transaction with this method . You can only read data which is in call stack . Also it is not something which is hidden from SAP as you can see weblog in SDN on the topic .

Cheers

[Former Member]

hi,

modify like this

REPORT ZTESTING.

FIELD-SYMBOLS: <fs_buptab> TYPE ANY.

DATA: varname(20) TYPE c VALUE '(SAPMF05A)BUPTAB[]'.

• table from program SAPMF05A is here and ready to change,

• read.....

ASSIGN varname TO <fs_buptab>.

IF sy-subrc NE 0.

MESSAGE e999(zdevel) WITH 'FIELD SYMBOL ASSIGNMENT ERROR'.

ENDIF.

cheers,

sasi

[Vinod_Chandran]

Hi,

You can get more info on this from

/people/brad.williams/blog/2005/04/25/userexits--how-do-i-access-inaccessible-data

Cheers

Vinod