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The competition in the SAP market is everyday stronger and if we want to succeed as a
functional consultant we cannot rely only in our business knowledge only. It is very
important to have some basic ABAP technical knowledge, so that we can dig into
complex issues.
With this in mind, I'll share some quick tips that I have learned along the years that will
help functional consultants to start to use debugging as an effect troubleshooting tool.
Bear in mind that debugging requires time and patience, and you will only learn to do it
properly if you take your time to practice.
Very often an error or warning message is not clear or does not provide the necessary
details to find the exact cause of the error.
A classic example is the error message 'The date 00.00.0000 is not convertible (please
correct)' which can be triggered in several transactions. When this message is triggered
by MRP or in transaction MD04, it does not specify exactly what is the planning
element for which the error happened.
Another typical issue is a custom error message being triggered by an exit or BAdI, but
you don't know exactly which exit or BAdI is triggering the message.
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For such cases, there is a very simple trick to find exactly where the error message is
triggered.
Lets see a very basic example. I'll get into transaction CO02 and enter a production
order that does not exist.
The following error message will be triggered:
The last three digits are always the message number and the rest is the message ID.
When a message is triggered by the system, the message ID is stored on SYMSGID
and the message number is stored on SYMSGNO
Now I want to know exactly where this error message is triggered.
Open transaction CO02, enter a production order that does not exist on the database.
Type '/H' on the command to open debug and press enter.
Click the button 'Watchpoint' to create a new watchpoint.
You will get the following screen, where you will create a watchpoint for SY
MSGNO, where the value of the variable is '017'. In some cases, you don`t know
the message number, so you can leave the condition empty. In such case, system
will stop on every message, instead of going directly to the desired message.
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Confirm and press F8 to continue with the program execution.
System will stop exactly on the point where the error message is triggered.
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Here we can also check the values of the internal tables and see why the error message
is triggered. We can also see that the message is hardcoded as an error, because there is
an 'e' before the message number.
Similarly, It would be possible to set a watchpoint for SYMSGID, where the value is
equal to 'CO'.
On this example, I can see that the error is happening after function module
CO_DB_HEADER_READ is called. This is the function module where the order
header is read from the database, so I can get deeper into the code to find exactly where
the order is read. Another idea is to look for correction notes that change this function
module or the caller program.
With a little knowledge of code we can find the solution of problems that we would
spent hours researching and checking on the documentation.
* This content was originally published in SCN:
https://archive.sap.com/documents/docs/DOC53035
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Caetano Almeida
CoE Support Architect at SAP Seguir
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