SAP R/3 : ALV Limitation...

ALV report itself is a nice tool that allow developers to quickly come out with a nice report that does not require much of programming to build columns, pump in data, sort it, or providing it a few icons or additional instructions. Allowing you to focus on processing data only. Unfortunately, ALV report itself presents a few problems or limitations that somehow hampers our requirements when it comes to large and long report that user wants.

OSS Notes : 857823

Detailing that cells with CHAR or STRING type are truncated after 128. This affects ALV Grid function control and some other SAPGUI display. This is a standard behavior.

OSS Notes : 910300

Next, this notes detailing (UNICODE) that it is also a program limitation for ALV Grid that truncates text. The only solution is to modify the program to only take in a maximum of 42 character for a cell.

OSS Notes : 959775

Also, ALV GRID column of text based cells are truncated or replace '...' so to display that there are more text after that position. This is considered by SAP as an error. You might include the layout method optimize_colwidth = 'X' but it is not the solution but applying SAP Patch.

PATCH : SAPGUI 640 PATCH 21 (Release since 6.0)

OSS Notes : 78401

In addition, last year, I did mention there's another limitation to downloading xls from ALV. Here is the link: http://isskythelimittechnical.blogspot.com/2007/02/sap-r3-spool-converting-report-to-xls.html

Reference : 857823, 910300 and 959775 and obtain from https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/thread?messageID=4770708#4770708

is sky the limit... alv grid limitation...

SAP R/3 : Spool CONVERTING report to XLS file error...

A project costing report of my client recently had a problem downloading their report via spool into an excel file. The report was not align accordingly to the cells in the xls file. All records in the report were merge as one string and assign to a single cell at the first column in the xls file.

So we grouped together a few ABAP consultants and functional consultants to figure out what was the possible solution to enable the ABAP report to be downloaded into xls via spool correctly. So to say, we need to figure out how to make each column in the ABAP report correctly downloaded into each xls column as exactly as it is.

After several days of searching, the functional found an OSS notes, 78401, that describe our problem (symptom) and prescribed a solution. The solution was to provide the ABAP report to be optically identifiable by vertical lines so the spool knows what are the columns. Currently, the report in question was a classic ABAP report and no lines to indicate what were columns in the report. That makes sense. So an ABAP consultant was set to convert the classic report into an ALV report.

The result, it solves the problems. Now, the customer can happily download their report into xls format via the spool without any problem.

OSS NOTES : 78401.

is sky the limit... no vertical lines in report can make the spool blind.