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Editing in ABAP Source Code EditorsLocate this document in the navigation structure

You can adopt the specific functions and utilities for efficiently creating, editing, and navigating in ABAP source code in accordance with your needs.

General Behavior

The following section describes the editing features that are the same in all editors:

Procedure

  1. An editor is locked immediately when you start editing. To unlock the editor again, choose Ctrl U. You will be asked whether you want to discard your changes.
  2. The syntax check is executed automatically in Eclipse. When you stop typing, a syntax check is triggered, and in normally less than a second the syntax check result is available in the Problems view.
  3. To activate an object, choose Ctrl F3 or the context menu in the editor.
  4. In Eclipse, the name of the pretty printer is Source formatter. You can execute the source formatter by choosing Start of the navigation path Source Next navigation step Format End of the navigation path from the menu or the context menu of an editor, or by choosing the Shift F1 shortcut.

Using Code Completion

In the ABAP source code editor, the code completion proposes valid ABAP keywords and identifiers to you that can be inserted within the source code at your current position.

Procedure

  1. To trigger code completion in the editor, choose Ctrl Space.
    A popup with a list of possible entries at the current source code position is opened.
  2. Focus the popup by choosing Tab.
    The screen reader announces the entries and you can access additional information for each entry by choosing Tab again. Now another popup with additional information in HTML is focused.
  3. To get back to the code completion list, choose Esc.
  4. To select one entry, choose Enter.
  5. To select a method, for example, you can insert the whole method signature by choosing Shift Enter.

Using Quick Assists

Quick assists, like renaming an attribute or defining a local variable, help you to change ABAP source code in a semi-automated way.

Context

Procedure

  1. To open the Quick Assist popup, choose Ctrl 1.
  2. Then choose Tab to focus the popup.
  3. Navigate through the list.

    Like with code completion, there is an additional popup that shows more information for each quick assist. Currently, screen readers might not be able to access this popup in Eclipse. Therefore, ADT provides the Quick Assist view as an alternative. This view can be linked with the current source code position to show the available quick assists and the additional information at this position.