Creating and Maintaining Text Symbols

Context

Using a text symbol makes a development object translateable and easier to maintain.

Note

Before ABAP Development Tools (ADT) NW7.40 SP08, you opened text elements through the context menu entry Start of the navigation path Open Others Next navigation step Text Elements End of the navigation path in the SAP GUI.

In ADT NW7.40 SP08 and higher, you can use various quick assits to create and edit text symbols directly in the source code editor.

Example

You can use text symbols in the following use cases:

WRITE statement: WRITE:/ text-001.
Variable assignment: greeting = 'hello'(BO1).
Method call: print ('hello').

The following other quick assists are available for working with text symbols:

The table below shows the available quick assists, depending on the way a text is addressed in the source code and on whether a corresponding text symbol already exists in the text pool.

Table 1: Precondition Checks for Providing Other Quick Assists
Source code provided	Text symbol does not exist	Text symbol already exists
`text-001`	Create	Edit
`text-001`	Create	Add_literal => `'hello'(001)`
`'hello'(001)`	Create	Edit => `'goodbye'(001)`
		Align source code with text pool
		Remove_literal => `text-001`
`'hello'`	Create => `'hello'(001)`	X
`'HELLO'`	No proposal for texts in all uppercase Note Text in uppercase is not considered for translation. In this case, no quick assist is provided.	X

Limitation

Text symbols are not considered whenever you copy a development object.