Categories: ABAP, SAP

Alternative SAP GUI Progress Indicator

If you have done much ABAP programming, you will probably have made use of the SAPGUI_PROGRESS_INDICATOR function at some point or other, which can be used to display the progress of a task. Desiring an alternative progress indicator, I set out to find an ActiveX object that provided a progress bar which I could control with OLE from ABAP.


Improved ABAP Source Code Search

In my last post I showed you how to create your own searchable index of ABAP source code using Ruby in conjunction with the Ferret and saprfc extensions. Today I am going to show you a hugely improved version that will reduce the indexing time and give you a nicer search interface. (Amazingly, this whole thing came in rather handy for me in the last week!)


Categories: ABAP, Ruby, SAP, Workplace

Custom ABAP source search with saprfc and Ferret

Today we are going to build our own search engine to search through ABAP source code on an SAP system using our favourite language – Ruby! (With the help of some nice libraries). Sure, there is the “Find in source code” option in SE38, and apparently you can use TREX as well, but this is much more fun.

UPDATE (19 June 2009): Refer to the next post for an improved version of the solution.


Categories: ABAP, SAP, Workplace

Gain shell access to your SAP ABAP system

The next time you are in the mood for some interesting Friday hacking, I may have just the thing for you. (This will only be fun of course if you are in a fairly restricted environment, where doing this kind of thing would be considered a hack 😉 ).


Categories: ABAP, SAP

Interesting (but less useful) information about ABAP

Sometimes you stumble across things, which, though not mind blowing, could turn out to be useful one day, but for the time being you just have to file under “trivia”. I recently made two such discoveries.


SAP and The Matrix: an analogy

When you think about it, working in SAP is much like The Matrix (the ABAP side at least, and to ensure a good analogy, let’s exclude BW from the picture or focus just on ECC).


Categories: SAP

IDE, the ABAP way

Lately I have been musing (contemplating, meditating on) the term “IDE” or “Integrated Development Environment”. What is it that makes it integrated? Well, you have of course an editor, a compiler and a debugger (or any other combination of tools) integrated into one program. However, the program itself is still pretty much standalone. It is usually not integrated into anything else. So much for “integrated”. Tsk, tsk.


Categories: SAP

Mass change your SAP passwords

The short version: Here is a script to automate changing your SAP password across many systems. The long version follows…


Categories: SAP

Who’s your special Basis person?

With Mother’s day over, it’s time to reflect again on the other special persons in ones life. Today I had an amusing discussion with two colleagues about who’s Basis guy is the best. It turned out very much like a discussion between some five-year olds about who’s dad is the strongest.


If the shoe doesn’t fit…

The decade of the 90s was the heyday of ERP systems. Of course, the history goes back much further. Look at SAP, for example, who started in the early 70s by producing “one size fits all” solutions. This was of course a radical departure from the norm up to then, in that most companies wrote their own systems from scratch. SAP recognized a need in the market for such solutions, as the same solutions were being written over and over again. While I imagine that this worked quite well for accounting software like SAP’s first product, R/1, covering other aspects of business is and has been a different story.