ABAP_to_the_Future

5
Debugger Scripting
Finally, I would be remiss not to ment ion that SAP expects you to write your
debugger information to trace files as op posed to the application log, and the
Script Wizard gives you assorted write trace options to achieve this.
5.4 Summary
This chapter started by acknowledging that sitting in front of the debugger is like
death and taxes—always with us—and can be quite boring and time consuming.
The very next time you are in the debugger—it could be tomorrow, it could be in
10 minutes—take a step back, look at wh at you are doing from the outside, and
see if you are doing the same steps again and again. If so, debugger scripting can
probably help you.
If looking at the list of options the Script Wizard provides makes you feel the paradox
of choice—there is so much you can do that you don’t know where to start
and so end up not using debugger scripting at all—worry not. Here are some tips
for how debugger scripting can be used in the real world:
왘 Tracing every line executed by a program
This is the exampl e you see most often in stan dard SAP examples about the
debugger script. There are a variety of predefined debugger scripts supplied by
SAP, and one of them is RSTPDA_SCRIPT_STATEMENT_TRACE, which only has one
command in the SCRIPT method. What this does is to write to a trace file every
single line of every single program that gets executed, in the order those lines
gets executed.
You can take a copy of such predefined scripts and change them any way you
want, so you can have the result list filtered by breakpoints or watchpoints or
by any custom criteria you can think of.
왘 Skipping authority checks
When I’m presenting at SAP conferences, I often have a quick (or not so quick)
drink with SAP expert Brian O’Neill from Nevada. He wrote a blog post on SCN
in which he gave an example of a common tedious problem when debugging.
Sometimes, the programmer may not have authorization for everything in the
program being tested. To get around this, traditionally you had to stop at every
AUTHORITY-CHECK statement and if the check failed then set SY-SUBRC manually
to zero so you could continue. This ge ts boring in a hurry. With a debugger
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