Slide 41 of 60

Text Symbols

Text symbols are text constant specified and maintained outside a program. One of the advantages of using text symbols is that the string is no longer hard-coded in the program. This means that you can maintain the text without having to access the source code. Such a procedure is particularly significant for software which exists in several languages.

Instead of writing text directly in program code, you can use text symbols. Text represented by text symbols is stored in the Repository and is always displayed in the language of the user. The primary benefit of text symbols is that they can be translated without affecting the source code of a program.

Text symbols are used instead of text literals in programs because the programs are then independent of any particular language and remain easy to maintain.

• Each text symbol must have a three-character ID.
  
• There are two ways in which you can address text symbols in a program:
  • TEXT-xxx (where xxx is a three-character string)
  • 'string' (xxx).
    
• To maintain text symbols, from the ABAP/4 Editor menu for a particular program, choose Goto Text elements Text symbols
  
• You can translate texts into other languages (From the ABAP/4 Development Workbench menu: Utilities Translation).

Authored by: Roger Hayen © Central Michigan Univeristy and/or © SAP America, Inc. All rights reserved.