title: Suppress sign for DDIC types CURR and QUAN in ALV
body: <p>Eventually I came across surprising fact that internal ABAP Dictionary types for currency and quantity (data elements based on them) implicitly save sign information no matter what setting have been set in data element domain.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fuG8Z.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fuG8Z.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>Even with the above domain the data element preserves sign in ALV. Can we prevent ALV (or ABAP) from such behavior?<br>
  I thoroughly read documentation about both <a href="http://help.sap.com/abapdocu_740/en/abenddic_currency_field.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CURR</a> and <a href="http://help.sap.com/abapdocu_740/en/abenddic_quantity_field.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">QUAN</a> but found no single word about sign. Can somebody explain this?</p>
  
  <p>The only solution I ended with was to use DEC type and data-elements based on DEC.</p>
  
  <p><strong>ADDITION</strong>: simple test to check the described issue<br>
  1. Create three variables of types <code>BNOMS</code> (domain <code>BWHR</code>), <code>MATQUAN</code> (domain <code>MENG10</code>) and <code>MENGEP</code> (domain <code>MENGEP</code>). All these types are standard DDIC types with <strong>unchecked</strong> sign field in domain.<br>
  2. Assign a negative value to them<br>
  3. Output them to ALV<br></p>
  
  <p>As <code>BNOMS</code> and <code>MATQUAN</code> types are CURR and QUAN types, they will output the sign anyways whereas <code>MENGEP</code> will not, as it has DEC type.
  In the run-time all they preserve sign however in ALV DEC-type domain restrictions are respected, so I tend to think it's more ALV-related issue.</p>