ABAP Development: ABAP News for Release

7.40 - Constructor Operators COND and

SWITCH
Posted by Horst Keller 28 May, 2013
With Release 7.40 ABAP supports so called constructor operators. Constructor operators are used in
constructor expressions to create a result that can be used at operand positions. The syntax for constructor
expressions is
... operator type( ... ) ...
operator is a constructor operator. type is either the explicit name of a data type or the character #. With #
the data type can be dreived from the operand position if the operand type is statically known. Inside the
parentheses specific parameters can be specified.

Conditional operators COND and SWITCH

Last but not least, two nice ones, the conditionals COND and SWITCH.
... COND dtype|#( WHEN log_exp1 THEN result1
[ WHEN log_exp2 THEN result2 ]
...
[ ELSE resultn ] ) ...
constructs a result of the specified type that depends on logical expressions.
... SWITCH dtype|#( operand
WHEN const1 THEN result1
[ WHEN const2 THEN result2 ]
...
[ ELSE resultn ] ) ...
constructs a result of the specified type that depends on a case differentiation.
With other words: IF and CASE as expressions in operand positions!

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ABAP Development: ABAP News for Release 7.40 - Constructor Operators COND and SWITCH

Example for COND

DATA(time) =
COND string(
WHEN sy-timlo < '120000' THEN
|{ sy-timlo TIME = ISO } AM|
WHEN sy-timlo > '120000' THEN
|{ CONV t( sy-timlo - 12 * 3600 )
TIME = ISO } PM|
WHEN sy-timlo = '120000' THEN
|High Noon|
ELSE
THROW cx_cant_be( ) ).
Note the THROW. Now you can raise and throw exceptions ...

Example for SWITCH

CLASS cx_langu_not_supported DEFINITION INHERITING FROM cx_static_check.
ENDCLASS.
CLASS class DEFINITION.
PUBLIC SECTION.
METHODS meth IMPORTING iso_langu TYPE string
RETURNING VALUE(text) TYPE string.
ENDCLASS.
CLASS class IMPLEMENTATION.
METHOD meth.
...
ENDMETHOD.
ENDCLASS.
...

DATA(text) =

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ABAP Development: ABAP News for Release 7.40 - Constructor Operators COND and SWITCH

NEW class(
)->meth(
SWITCH #( sy-langu
WHEN 'D' THEN `DE`
WHEN 'E' THEN `EN`
ELSE THROW cx_langu_not_supported( ) ) ).
Amazing, n'est-ce pas?
7585 Views Tags: abap

Michael Calekta in response to Horst Keller on page 3

17 Feb, 2016 4:14 PM
I see - so it's time to move to Eclipse, I guess. Well, that will be rather a hard thing to get my company to take
this step...
Horst Keller in response to Michael Calekta on page 3
17 Feb, 2016 4:01 PM
Phew ...
Not much investment into classical SE11 any more and let's see how the Dictionary Tools in ADT will get
along. Up to now (7.50) we have a form based editor for data elements and a source code based editor for
structures in ADT.
Michael Calekta in response to Horst Keller on page 3
17 Feb, 2016 3:57 PM
Okay - understood.
The word "currently" gives hope, that it might be possible in future versions, right?
Horst Keller
17 Feb, 2016 3:53 PM
The vanished question was:
Question: How do I define a global Table-Type in the DDIC as Standard-Table with empty
key? There's no fitting option in the tab for the primary-key definition. Unless it's the "Not
specified"-option, but not specified is in my understanding different from empty, is it not?

Answer: You can't.

"It is not currently possible to specify an empty primary table key explicitly in ABAP Dictionary"
If possible, define your table types in a class or an interface.

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ABAP Development: ABAP News for Release 7.40 - Constructor Operators COND and SWITCH

Horst Keller in response to Tom Dhooghe on page 4

8 Apr, 2015 3:38 PM
Latest versions of SAP GUI and ADT Editors do it right.
Tom Dhooghe
8 Apr, 2015 2:25 PM
The COND has been very useful as a sort of ternary operator to streamline code that would otherwise look very
convoluted.
Sadly, it seems that the editor's syntax highlighting has not been updated for this notation and it will mark parts
of the statement in red, indicating they are invalid even though it compiles and executes fine. Are there plans to
update the syntax highlighter to support these statements? (Tested in 7.4 SP7 and SP9)
Horst Keller in response to Paul Hardy on page 4
29 May, 2013 10:13 AM
No support for this in SAP GUI but in (at least my) Eclipse, crtl+F1 on class=>meth( ) and it will create the
method for you.
Nevertheless, from my learning of ABAP long time ago I remember some very misleading effects from this. In
old ABAP trainings they've explained subroutines (FORMs) coming from PERFORM. First write PERFORM.
double click, implement. Problem was that people did not understand that the FORM and its parameter
interface are the important part and that PERFORM is only its user. There were big problems in explaining the
modes forparameter passing because everything was based on PERFORM and not on FORM where the real
definition lies. But let's expect, that nowadays developers know what they are doing ...
Paul Hardy
29 May, 2013 9:19 AM
While we are talking about local classes and methods, are there any plans in 740 or beyond, that when you re
writing your code and call a method of a class and it does not exists, you get the "method does not exists - do
you want to create it?" and it creates a skeleton implementation and defintion, which is the case for PERFORM
routines.
This would speed up test driven development enormously. Sometimes people wonder why programmers are
slow to adopt OO, it is little niggly things like this that make writing methods more work than form routines.
People are lazy so they take the easy option.
I was told this is possible in ABAP in Eclipse.....
Horst Keller in response to Suhas Saha on page 4
29 May, 2013 7:40 AM
The exception is not thrown inside meth but in the context where meth is called. This context must have a
raising clause which is not shown here.
Suhas Saha
28 May, 2013 10:40 PM

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ABAP Development: ABAP News for Release 7.40 - Constructor Operators COND and SWITCH

Exception cx_langu_not_supported is not defined in the signature of meth( )

How to handle it then?

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