ABAP inline declaration doesn’t work in SAP BW

Since I started to use ABAP inline declarations I liked it much. Naturally I’m using it in all SAP NetWeaver environments where I do ABAP programming. However in case of SAP BW I recently faced problem applying the inline declarations.

In particular I programmed a Start routine within SAP BW’s transformation. I used the inline declarations in the Start routine. If I put the same code I had in the routine into standalone ABAP program - the code seemed to work. But if I placed the same code into the routine I got error message while trying to activate the transformation – “Error in Start Routine”.

The transformation couldn’t not be activated. I tried to do hopeless thing – to remove the inline declarations. So I redid the code w/o it. And surprisingly it worked!

The version of the SAP BW system I used was:

SAP_BW                  740     0009   SAPKW74009  SAP BW

SAP_ABA                 740     0009   SAPKA74009  Cross-Application Component

Kernel release          742

Compilation              AIX 1 6 00F79A484C00 use-pr20160324 Mar 30 20

Sup.Pkg lvl.             329

ABAP Load               1981

CUA load                 40

As the inline declarations are available in NW release 7.40, SP05 I assume it should work in SP09. However turned out that BW doesn’t really work with it. In case it is used standalone (e.g. ABAP report or FM) without encapsulating it into BW object like the transformation it doesn’t. I need to try to upgrade my system perhaps to BW 75 to see if it is solved in there :)