Establishing Length and Distance

You are no longer allowed to use the DESCRIBE DISTANCE statement to establish the length and distance of fields. Instead, you have to use one of the new statements DESCRIBE DISTANCE ... IN BYTE MODE or DESCRIBE DISTANCE ... IN CHARACTER MODE.

The statement DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH is also obsolete and you must use one of the new statements DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH ... IN BYTE MODE or DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH ... IN CHARACTER MODE, instead.

Using the statement DESCRIBE FIELD ... TYPE feld with flat structures previously provided the type C. Using it with flat strucutures in Unicode programs now provides the type u, which can be read up in the ABAP source code.

There are no changes with the DESCRIBE FIELD ... TYPE ... COMPONENTS ... statement in Unicode systems. Additionally, the DESCRIBE ... OUTPUT LENGTH ... statement still provides the output length in characters.