Tag: remote atc

Use remote ATC for baselining Z code

In the previous blogs we have explain how to run ATC from central system to remote system. This will enable you to for example run the ATC against an older release, which doesn’t have the ATC tool capability.

But there is one other common issue with older systems: you have lots of existing legacy Z code. If you want to clean up or start with new guidelines the ATC is initially not helpful since it will give you lots of errors.

This blog will explain the concept of baselining the current Z code with an initial run to give you a clean start.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How to setup the ATC baseline?
  • How to run the ATC baseline?
  • What are the known limitations of the ATC baseline functionality?

Setting the baseline

To set the baseline, first run a full ATC remote check. This will give many issues. In the ATC results screen select the run and press the button Baseline to mark the current results as baseline.

Set ATC baseline

You can choose that the current results are simply suppressed, are treated as exemptions or are treated as low priority.

If you run ATC tool again, please make sure in your run variant that you now select the consider baseline tick box:

ATC run settings for baseline

If you don’t change any coding in the remote system the next run of ATC should give you a clean run with no issues (in case you have chosen suppression).

ATC after baseline

In the remote system we now do 2 coding changes:

  • We had before the baseline a bad program called ZCRAP1. To this program we do a change.
  • We created a new program called ZCRAP2.

Now we run the ATC tool again with the baseline to ignore the baselined findings.

ATC results after baseline

The ATC tool now finds issues in both the changed and the newly created program.

The unfortunate thing is that for the old program, it does not look at the newly added lines, but it looks at ALL the issued in the analyzed code (also the existing). 
This might lead to some surprise if you add 1 line to a 1000 line existing bad code: this will give lots of errors. It is up to you to decide to fix the existing errors or just exempt the existing ones.

Baseline suppression known issues

The baseline suppression has some known issue situations. These are listed in OSS note 2552932 – ATC: Baseline Does not Suppress all Findings.

Bug fix notes:

Enabling ATC for remote checks

By using a Netweaver 7.52 server (or newer) you can use that server a central ATC server for running the ATC. For explanation on ATC itself, please check this blog.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • What are reasons for running remote ATC checks?
  • How to set up remote ATC checks?
  • Which limitations does remote ATC checks have?

Reasons for running remote ATC checks

There are several reasons why you might want to do this:

  • Run ATC against an old 7.00/7.01/7.02 system, where ATC is not delivered by SAP
  • Run ATC for S4HANA Readiness checks (see blog)
  • Run the latest ATC checks and you want to use the new baseline function (see blog)
  • Run the ATC tool centrally when you have more development systems, but still want to maintain the ruleset only once
Consider very carefully if the benefits you are looking for are worth the setup work below.

The master OSS note for the remote checks is 2375864 – ATC: Remote Checks – Developer Scenario.

Central system

First of all you need a 7.52 or higher system. This might already be big stumbling block if you don’t have this. In past blogs and notes you might find it works for 7.51 as well, but this will have severe limitations. For example the S4HANA Readiness only works properly on 7.52.

Read note 2364916 – Recommended SAP Notes for using ATC to perform remote analysis. Goto the section of the central check system for your version and see which OSS notes you need to apply so solve the known bugs.

Checked system

The master note 2375864 – ATC: Remote Checks – Developer Scenario  contains the OSS notes to be applied for the older versions. For the newer versions OSS note 2190065 – ATC/CI: Remote Code Analysis – Object Provider Stub is needed.

This looks like a simple action, but it is not. It will pull in dependent OSS notes. One of these notes is the key OSS note 2270689 – Remote Analysis (for source system). This note contains references to the notes to apply.

Notes referred to in note 2270689 can be HUGE OSS notes. It can take 15 to 20 minutes to download and will result into a time-out dump is you have standard 10 minutes set. Ask basis team to set rdisp/max_wprun_time and rdisp/scheduler/prio_high/max_runtime to 30 minutes for you to able to download this note.

Per checked system you will need an RFC connection from the central system to the checked system.

To initialize the remote check per checked system you must run program RS_ABAP_INIT_ANALYSIS:

RS_ABAP_INIT_ANALYSIS

Also run this program in the central system!

Configuring the central system

Start transaction ATC and goto the setup menu to set the system role:

System role menu

Select here the second option to make it a central system:

Set central system role

Then goto the menu for setting up the object providers:

Object providers

First create a group:

System group

The fill the RFC Object providers:

RFC object provider link to RFC connection

The vital element here is the RFC connection that you have created from the central system to the local system.

Make sure in the central system by testing in SM59: the connection is properly working. Also make sure that the user in the checked system has sufficient RFC rights to execute the remote ATC checks.

Setup the SCI variant for remote execution

In the central system set up the SCI variant for remote execution.

Be aware here one of the major limitations: you can only select the check which SAP has enabled for RFC based check:

Central SCI based on RFC

Remote ATC run execution

In the central system now define the ATC to run:

Remote ATC check definition

Important here:

  • The check variant has to be defined in the central system
  • The variant runs against the selected object provider you have just defined

After the first run you must likely will get check tool failures:

Check tool failures

Read the failures carefully and solve them one by one.

End result

The end result is the same as with the local system. By clicking on the code you will jump from central to checked system.

Bug fixes

Bug fix notes: