Creating watchpoints while debugging the ABAP Code

By Jayshree Santosh Mahajan, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Introduction:
Many times we have large number of rows into an internal table and we need to debug a particular row say
for a particular value of a field which is at 110 th row of an internal table, in this case it is very cumbersome to
debug an internal table row by row to reach that particular row.
To avoid this we can set a watchpoint for the particular value of a field or variable.
As soon as a change is found in the content of the variable after a Debug step and any conditions set have
been met, the Debugger will stop and we see the message "Watchpoint is reached
(<Watchpointvariable>).
For example, there are 30 entries into the internal table as shown below. Let us see how can we analyze
the 21st record i.e. material number 000000000000000599?

Steps:

1.

Set a debugging point at the loop statement of the internal table, once the debugging screen appears
then press F5, an entry would appear in the workarea LS_MARA.

2.

Now keep the cursor on the field to which we want to set the watchpoint. In this example we want to
set watchpoint for the LS_MARA-MATNR.

3.

Press Create watchpoint button on the toolbar of the debugger screen as below.

4.

We will automatically have the variable field populated with the desired field as shown below.

5.

Now enter the condition for which we want to set the watchpoint in the Free Condition Entry Field.

6.

We want to set watchpoint against material number 000000000000000599, so we entered value

LS_MARA-MATNR = 000000000000000599 in above highlighted field Free Condition Entry.

7.

The watchpoint will be created and we will have below message appeared in the status bar.

8.

Now press F7 to reach your desired record. We will get below message at the status bar of the
debugger screen:

9.

Now we will have the LS_MARA-MATNR = 000000000000000599 value in the workarea. We can
analyze the contents of the workarea for this material number directly, without looking at all records in
the internal table.

So in this way, we can set maximum 5 watchpoints.