Re: IBM iSeries Access for Windows ODBC driver ALIAS

Peter I think you would want to use  Label On :

*LABEL ON* SAMPLECOLL/INVENTORY_LIST
(ITEM_NUMBER      *IS* 'ITEM                NUMBER',
ITEM_NAME         *IS* 'ITEM                NAME',
UNIT_COST         *IS* 'UNIT                COST',
QUANTITY_ON_HAND  *IS* 'QUANTITY            ON                  HAND',
LAST_ORDER_DATE   *IS* 'LAST                ORDER               DATE',
ORDER_QUANTITY    *IS* 'NUMBER              ORDERED')


Example was from iSeries InfoCenter...

HTH,

Pete Helgren

Peter Dow (ML) wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Just ran across an interesting anomaly.  I used MS Access 2000 to open a
.mdb file and export one of its tables to a V5R3 iSeries using IBM's iSeries
Access for Windows ODBC driver (V5R2M0 SI10914).  It created the file on the
iSeries, and populated it with data with no errors or problems.

However, looking at the field definitions with DSPFFD, I noticed the
following:

Column headings are the MS Access field names in quotes, e.g. "Description"
instead of just Description.

The PF field names were generated from the MS Access field names as the 1st
five characters plus a 5-digit number, e.g. Division became DIVIS00001, even
though Division is within the 10-character limit.

The MS Access field names enclosed in quotes and upper/lower case became
alternative names (DDS keyword ALIAS).

What's interesting about this is that ALIAS("Division") is not allowed by
the SEU syntax checker, nor is it valid according to the V5R3 DDS manual.  I
have a utility that retrieves the physical file source, and using it then
trying to compile the resulting source failed because of the ALIAS.  I
modified the utility to strip the quotes and convert the field name to all
uppercase.  But it does seem odd that the ODBC driver gets away with
creating a physical file with an invalid ALIAS.

Does SQL have an equivalent to ALIAS that would allow this?
Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
www.dowsoftware.com
909 793-9050 voice
909 793-4480 fax



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