Reg:OBJECTS_OBJREF_NOT_ASSIGNED dump

Question

Hi Experts,
I am seeing a lot of OBJECTS_OBJREF_NOT_ASSIGNED dumps in one of our productions servers with the a few of the cancelled background jobs.
We have just upgraded from 4.7 to ECC6
The error text is
An exception occurred that is explained in detail below.
The exception, which is assigned to class 'CX_SY_REF_IS_INITIAL', was not
caught in
procedure "GET_SPECIAL_DATA_INTERNAL" "(METHOD)", nor was it propagated by a
RAISING clause.
Since the caller of the procedure could not have anticipated that the
exception would occur, the current program is terminated.
The reason for the exception is:
You attempted to use a 'NULL' object reference (points to 'nothing')
access a component (variable: "ME->GO_PARENT_CBASE_PROFILE").
An object reference must point to an object (an instance of a class)
before it can be used to access components.
Either the reference was never set or it was set to 'NULL' using the
CLEAR statement.
We have tried to find the SAP notes,but could not find the proper ones
Kindly help us fix the dump issue
Rgds-
Venu

Answer 1

Hi Venu,
In your setup of the shared memory area in SHMA, do you have the versioning option unchecked?  If you do that might explain your issue.  If a user tries to access the one instance of the object in the shared memory area while it is currently being refreshed to memory they will get this short dump.  The one way to protect against this error would be to make sure that the user reading from the memory area does a check for success in attach_for_read( ) before going further.  See this example:
  DATA: lv_tries TYPE i,
        lv_subrc TYPE sy-subrc.
  CONSTANTS: lc_max TYPE i VALUE '10000''.
Initialize variables for a max of 10000 tries
  CLEAR lv_tries.
  lv_subrc = 1.
Attach for read from shared memory area
  WHILE lv_tries < lc_max AND lv_subrc <> 0.
    TRY.
      cl_area = zcl_shm_employee_master=>attach_for_read( ).
      lv_subrc = sy-subrc.
      CATCH: cx_shm_inconsistent,
                   cx_shm_no_active_version,
                   cx_shm_read_lock_active,
                   cx_shm_exclusive_lock_active,
                   cx_shm_parameter_error,
                   cx_shm_change_lock_active.
      lv_tries = lv_tries + 1.
    ENDTRY.
  ENDWHILE.
Raise exception if tries reaches count of 10000
  IF lv_tries = lc_max.
    RAISE READ_ERROR.
  ENDIF.
The number 10000 is an arbitrary number chosen for the example but you can get the idea from it.  This will ensure that either a success attach is performed or an exception is thrown.  Of course you could always just call multiple times until you get a successful attach.  I did it this way to avoid a potential infinite loop in the case that it is not able to attach successfully.
Regards,
Ryan Crosby