Dear community, have you ever heard of the “Null-Safe Navigation Operator”? Me not which isn’t bad either. I can’t know everything, especially when it’s fairly new. I came across the term on this blog together with an example like that:

" old syntax 
IF lv_object IS NOT INITIAL.

" new syntax
IF lv_object?.

That caught my attention (not because of the Hungarian notation). I know the “Safe Navigation Operator” which is available in various programming languages to avoid the “Pyramid of doom“. So some kind of syntactic sugar.

I was interested in the example because I wouldn’t use IS NOT INITIAL on a reference variable. In this case IS BOUND would be my choice. Also, I wouldn’t expect ABAP language designers to put a “?.” combination at the end of an statement. That looks a bit strange.

After some research: I couldn’t find anything about this in the official latest ABAP keyword documentation (ABAP for Cloud Development). Also, I could not develop a syntactically error-free example on the SAP BTP ABAP Trial Environment.

Either there is an innovation for ABAP coming in the near/far future or the information is … simply wrong. Who knows the truth?

Oh, there is another “interesting” example on the mentioned blog that doesn’t work for me:

" old syntax
IF lv_condition = 'X'.

" new syntax
IF lv_condition = 'X' ? 'Yes' : 'No'.

Many thanks for reading and stay healthy

Michael