Foreign function calls can mess with your status or even worse abort the transaction or report. There are a lot of function calls the use MESSAGE to inform/warn the user or use it without the optional RAISING in combination with an Abort or Error message type, which causes your nice transaction to abort. Well there is hope. ABAP knows the special error_messages exception which changes the way MESSAGEs are handled.

Yesterday I submitted a patch to the pygments bugtracker with a functioning lexer for ABAP. I hope that it'll be included in the next release.

A little example and the first public piece of ABAP code that has been highlighted with pygments.

REPORT z_hello_world.

PARAMETERS: gv_name TYPE text50.

WRITE: 'Hello', gv_name.

The lexer currently has one little problem. If you define a variable with the same name as an ABAP keyword, it'll also highlight that variable. Maybe I'll get around to fixing that, but that'll be quite a task since that means parsing every ABAP statement and not just highlighting the keywords.

A quick tip when working with ALV-Grids or transactions that use ALV-Grids and don't display changes to data structures.

A couple of days ago I found Forklift a Finder replacment. The main thing that caught my attention is the dual pane interface that I was missing from my Total Commander days. Yes I'm a switcher.

In the last few weeks when booting my MacBookPro I've had it display a folder icon with a question mark in it. Now I don't know what that means, but it got me on my toes about getting a proper backup solution up and running. This is especially important as the MBP is my one and only work computer. Since I recently bought myself a QNAP TS-409Pro and have it running with 4 750GB hard disc in a RAID 5, I thought that'd be the perfect place for my backup. It's where the backup was before but I had to remeber to copy it there via the Finder. I knew the QNAP has rsync support. While googling for a rsync backup script or HOWTO, I stumbled upon rdiff-backup. A quick check in the ipkg package list turned up rdiff-backup and a MacPorts version is available as well.

So here is the install guide to get you going.