ALV has nice consistency check. This tool provides a “diagnostic” view for developers if any missing information for ALV. But during upgrade, this may cause issues if handled poorly.

What is ALV Consistency Check?

Consistency check is good diagnostic tool for ALV. This shows what information is missing for various different pieces – like Field catalog, Sorts, etc – for ALV.

You can do consistency check via any of this method:

• Enter &SOS in transaction code box and press Enter

• Press shift and right click 3 times on the empty space on GUI container

• Start consistency check all the time by passing the parameter I_INTERFACE_CHECK as X

And problem with Upgrade

Many of the customer programs here at one of my client are using the 3rd option i.e. passing parameter to do consistency check, and soon after upgrade to EHP7 they start showing the consistency check screen before ALV.

 
  CALL FUNCTION 'REUSE_ALV_GRID_DISPLAY'
    EXPORTING
      I_INTERFACE_CHECK        = 'X' 
 

Users freaked out as they don’t know this screen nor they anticipated. If user presses back button, he will see what is was expecting. Freaking out level is reduced but not gone back to normal. From support perspective this is not show stopper but small bump in the road. Just tell everyone whoever complains to press the back button. Life is easy! But, it’s not. Generally users are not open for change! I also sometimes don’t like when some app changes the UI.

So, I deep dive in the ALV logic to figure out what is going on. ALV consistency check tool has made few changes and due to that this odd behavior. SAP made few messages with Error severity instead of the Warning severity. So, before upgrade – All consistency checks were “passed”. Now, after upgrade this passed consistency checks become “failed” without any change in program.

Include program LSKBHH08 has the local classes which does the consistency check. In the version compare with non upgraded system, it apparent that SAP has made changes to the “rules” and thus all the trouble. If you want to debug more, you can start from here.

Bug in SAP?

You would be tempted to run the ALV consistency check on consistency check. If you do that, it would end up in the short dump. Looks like you can’t have diagnostic on diagnostic tool 😉

Take Away

So I suggest you to only use the consistency check parameter when you are developing the ALV. Or better perform the consistency check on demand before moving the changes to different system. You can include this point into your QA review process, if you have any!