Get Text Symbol Programmatically With ID

Question

Is there any way of programmatically getting the value of a Text Symbol at runtime?

The scenario is that I have a simple report that calls a function module. I receive an exported parameter in variable LV_MSG of type CHAR1. This indicates a certain status message created in the program, for instance F (Fail), X (Match) or E (Error). I currently use a CASE statement to switch on LV_MSG and fill another variable with a short description of the message. These descriptions are maintained as text symbols that I retrieve at compile time with text-MS# where # is the same as the possible returns of LV_MSG, for instance text-MSX has the value "Exact Match Found".

Now it seems to me that the entire CASE statement is unnecessary as I could just assign to my description variable the value of the text symbol with ID 'MS' + LV_MSG (pseudocode, would use CONCATENATE). Now my issue is how I can find a text symbol based on the String representation of its ID at runtime. Is this even possible?

If it is, my code would look cleaner and I wouldn't have to update my actual code when new messages are added in the function module, as I would simply have to add a new text symbol. But would this approach be any faster or would it in fact degrade the report's performance?

Answer 1

Personally, I would probably define a domain and use the fixed values of the domain to represent the values. This way, you would even get around the string concatenation. You can use the function module DD_DOMVALUE_TEXT_GET to easily access the language-dependent text of a domain value.

To access the text elements of a program, use a function module like READ_TEXT_ELEMENTS.

Be aware that generic programming like this will definitely slow down your program. Whether it would make your code look cleaner is in the eye of the beholder - if the values change rarely, I don't see why a simple CASE statement should be inferior to some generic text access.

Answer 2

Hope I understand you correctly but here goes. This is possible with a little trickery, all the text symbols in a report are defined as variables in the program (with the name text-abc where abc is the text ID). So you can use the following:

data: lt_all_text type standard table of textpool with default key,
      lsr_text    type ref to textpool.

"Load texts - you will only want to do this once
read textpool sy-repid into lt_all_text language sy-langu.
sort lt_all_Text by entry.

"Find a text, the field KEY is the text ID without TEXT-
read table lt_all_text with key entry = i_wanted_text
     reference into lsr_text binary search.

If you want the address you can add:

field-symbols: <l_text> type any.

data l_name type string.
data lr_address type ref to data.

concatenate 'TEXT-' lsr_text->key into l_name.
assign (l_name) to <l_text>.
if sy-subrc = 0.
  get reference of <l_text> into lr_address.
endif.

As vwegert pointed out this is probably not the best solution, for error handling rather use message classes or exception objects. This is useful in other cases though so now you know how.