Crossing Checkpoint Charlie in a SAAB

[bjorn-henrik_zink]

Confusing title? I am referring to the checkpoint group transaction SAAB and the third (Charlie=C=Third letter in the Latin alphabet) option of checkpoint groups, namely logpoints. ABAP offers logpoints as of NW 2004s.

Since the beginning of checkpoint groups in 2005 the topic has been covered in several blogs on SCN, for example

• Checkpoint-Group the powerful friend of every ABAPer but…beware! by Andrea Olivieri
• How to Instrument Your ABAP Code With Checkpoint Groups by Claudia Dangers

Despite the obvious advantages of checkpoint groups I get the impression that they are still not widely used in custom ABAP code. Maybe it is because developers cannot find good arguments that justify the implementation effort. Therefore this blog focuses on describing one scenario where logpoints are beneficial. I will also provide a step-by-step example of how to use logpoints.  Let me emphasize that I am not covering all functionality of checkpoint groups, please read about checkpoint groups on help.sap.com if you need this information. Also keep in mind that the ABAP coding is written with an aim of making the scenario understandable and is not an example of how to program spotless ABAP!

1. Scenario

Time and again I face a recurring problem. There is a critical issue in the production environment which cannot be reproduced in the development or test systems. The functional experts are blaming the developers and the developers are sure that the problem is configuration related. After all the developer can compare the code of the development, test, and production system and has not found any deviations. Since it is working fine in the development and test systems, the developer concludes that the problem must be configuration related. The functional expert, however, has compared the configuration and is sure that is just another ABAP bug that has found its way to the production system. In the meanwhile the business is stressing to get the problem fixed. The helpful developer therefore decides to have a further look at the problem. By reading the application log she can find out where the issue is approximately, but does not understand why it occurs. It would be helpful to see the values of the custom implementations and compare them with the successful values in the development system. Debugging the production system is not possible for numerous reasons.

2. Example

The next example is very simple and helps to show how easy it is to develop logpoints. It describes how to log input and output parameters of a method. My recommendation is that logging input and output parameters of important methods is a minimum. Developers, however, are free to add as many and complicated logs as they may wish on top of that.

2.1 Code

Following the theme of this blog, I have created a class with a method called BORDER_CONTROL. It has an importing table and an exporting table. The structure of the table consists of a name, description, nationality, date, and a flag indicating whether or not the person is allowed to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie.

For testing purposes I have created a little program calling the class method BORDER_CONTROL.

2.2 Activating the Checkpoint Group

In order to log the logpoints of method BORDER_CONTROL, it is necessary to activate the checkpoint group.

Switch the radio button from Inactive to Log.

It is possible to restrict who should trigger the log by selecting specific users. Press the User button.

Press . Type in the user name.

Save the checkpoint group. Upon saving the following dialog appears. Here you can restrict how long time the activation is valid. In a production environment, I recommend to activate the checkpoint group just before running a process and deactivating it immediately thereafter.

Now you can run the above mentioned test program Z_CHECKPOINTS by hitting F8. A log entry has been created. It can be viewed by pressing the Log tab of the checkpoint group.

By expanding the log tree it is possible to get to the log fields. In this case the importing and exporting tables of method BORDER_CONTROL.

These are the values of the importing table.

The exporting table contains an allowed flag for Lou Gram.

With this type of information the developer can get an overview of the data flowing in and out of custom methods, which should help identify potential issues and/or reproduce the problems in other systems.  The development effort is minimal and I hope that the use of checkpoint groups in customer ABAP code will increase.

In this blog I have described one reason why I use logpoints in my custom code. There are plenty of other reasons which are not covered here. How do you use checkpoint groups?

(For more information on Checkpoint Charlie and Peter Fechter, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_charlie)