Symptom

ABAP locks are still set after a short dump or an exception.

Solution

In ABAP, an uncaught exception will also cause a short dump to be written in transaction ST22 (ABAP Dump Analysis). It is usual that after a short dump, all locks are released. However, it can happen from time to time that this does not happen, and that a lock will stay dangling. Such a dangling lock will then usually cause an error message to be displayed, namely that the data is locked in another session or already opened in another session, although the user does not have any other opened sessions.

This is exactly the same behavior that will be experienced when a running application (either a transaction or a Web Dynpro ABAP application) within NWBC causes a short dump or an uncaught exception. Also in this case, it is quite possible that there remain dangling locks which are not cleared. Note that the NWBC is just a newer UI technology onto the same ABAP runtime, and therefore we have exactly the same behavior patterns as when running the applications in SAP GUI or in a browser.

These locks have then to be manually removed via transaction SM12 (Display and Delete Locks). Transaction SM12 can either be started by logging on with the SAP GUI and running the transaction, or by starting the transaction directly from the NWBC shell.