I have an ABAP internal table. Structured, with several columns (e.g. 25). Names and types are irrelevant. The table can get pretty large (e.g. 5,000 records).
| A | B | ... |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 7 | X | ... |
| 2 | CCC | ... |
| 42 | DD | ... |
Now I'd like to set one of the columns (e.g. B) to a specific constant value (e.g. 'Z').
What is the shortest, fastest, and most memory-efficient way to do this?
My best guess is a LOOP REFERENCE INTO. This is pretty efficient as it changes the table in-place, without wasting new memory. But it takes up three statements, which makes me wonder whether it's possible to get shorter:
LOOP AT lt_table REFERENCE INTO DATA(ls_row).
ls_row->b = 'Z'.
ENDLOOP.
Then there is the VALUE operator which reduces this to one statement but is not very efficient because it creates new memory areas. It also gets longish for a large number of columns, because they have to be listed one by one:
lt_table = VALUE #( FOR ls_row in lt_table ( a = ls_row-a
b = 'Z' ) ).
Are there better ways?
The following code sets PRICE = 0 of all lines at a time. Theoritically, it should be the fastest way to update all the lines of one column, because it's one statement. Note that it's impossible to omit the WHERE, so I use a simple trick to update all lines.
DATA flights TYPE TABLE OF sflight.
DATA flight TYPE sflight.
SELECT * FROM sflight INTO TABLE flights.
flight-price = 0.
MODIFY flights FROM flight TRANSPORTING price WHERE price <> flight-price.
Reference: MODIFY itab - itab_lines