The other day I was troubleshooting a Floorplan Manager (FPM) application and needed to debug around an event triggered in a dialog window based on a GUIBB (Generic User Interface Building Block). Normally, when faced with this task, I use the familiar "More Field Help" function in the Web Dynpro runtime environment to locate the component configuration for the GUIBB, open it up in the Web Dynpro component configurator tool, and then look at the component configuration properties to identify the GUIBB's feeder class. Then, I can set breakpoints in the feeder class methods to debug the functionality using the ABAP Debugger as per usual.
While this is normally a pretty mundane task, I ran into a little bit of a challenge this time around: the Web Dynpro component configurator tool short dumped due to a coding error in an SAP component every time I tried to open up the target component configuration. So, without being able to determine the feeder class via the configurator tool, I needed to come up with an alternative method for locating the feeder class. What follows is one potential workaround for dealing with this kind of problem.
Workaround Steps to Locate the Feeder Class for a GUIBB Manually
- Open up the Data Browser tool (Transaction SE16) and display table WDY_CONFIG_DATA.
- Plug the GUIBB's component configuration ID in the CONFIG_ID field and hit the Execute button.
- In the table record, copy the hex-binary content stored in the XCONTENT field to your clipboard. This hex-binary content includes an XML document which contains additional metadata about the component configuration.
- There are many ways to decode the hex-binary content, but one simply way is to open up a browser window and navigate to http://www.string-functions.com/hex-string.aspx. This website provides a handy hex-binary to string converter tool as shown below. Here, notice that the feeder class is embedded within the
<FEEDER>element.
Hopefully you'll never need to use this, but if you do run into this problems, I hope this helps.
