ALV - Consistency Check

By Agnihotro Sinha

Problem:

Often for our ALV Programs output, we initially get a short dump or no data display or dump during sorting and rearrangement of columns. These things generally results from wrong design of Field catalog, Layout or Sorting Tables.

Tracking the error and rectifying the code definitely takes some good amount of efforts incase it’s a complex ALV Report.

Solution:

SAP provides quite a simple and convenient way to trace out these errors and eases the task of debugging by providing a detailed description of the errors and probable solutions.

To use this, press SHIFT + (Double Right Click) on any empty section of the ALV output screen of the Report as shown below in the output of the sample Report:

The below SAP standard analysis screen opens up. This screen gives a detailed technical report of the ALV Grid control used in the Report program.  

It has different tabs for FieldCatalog, Layout, Sort etc. which when clicked gives individual analysis report.

Example sample:

The example here displays 3 errors in the Report program in the initial display. This screen basically shows a summary of errors initially. When the buttons for Fcat or Layout are clicked above, individual errors are displayed then.

The short description of these errors is available along with a long description of selected errors.  

Also it displays in tabular format the detailed design of the Fcat, Layout and other tables used to build up the ALV display. For example, below table shows how I have build my layout in the program.

This can be verified from the code also as shown below:

Correction of errors:

This analysis report helps us to easily correct any kind of errors as done below.

Let us look into the 2nd displayed error:

From the error description it is quite evident that we have used a Data Element in the Fcat, which basically doesn’t exist in the Data Dictionary. When we look into the Fcat code in the program, we find:

We change ‘WERKS’ to WERKS_D’.

Activate and run the Report and submit for analysis by using SHIFT+Double Right click. Below is the result. The errors got reduced to 2.

Since it points out that field PLANT has a wrong value which means that the declaration of PLANT in the main Internal table, where values of PLANT are stored, might be wrong. We look into the declaration part of the Internal table. The PLANT field is declared with a wrong Data Type ‘WERKS’ in the Table. It should be ‘WERKS_D’.

Correction of Error:

Before change:  

After change

Activate and run the Report and submit for analysis again. This is what we get as the analysis result now:

Apart from this a lot of other information can be collected from this SAP standard analysis result. Hence we can conclude that this is quite a handy tool for analyzing the consistency of our ALV report generated. We can declare the ALV Grid error free only if no inconsistencies are found in this result.