RE: Long table column names - are they on the horizon?

They'd have to change the layout of I and O specs to accomodate longer

names, and I'm sure they're not eager to do that :)

I thought I and O specs were deprecated? People still use those? <tic>

You could simply read the file using an SQL statement.

True.

Or, you could write a preprocessor that retrieves the ALIAS names and uses

them to build the code for a data structure. (Or perhaps, use both...)

Not a bad idea for initial creation, but maintenance would be a pain.

Guess I will just add this to my list of "top ten things I want in RPG" :-)

Later,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces+albartell=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces+albartell=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Scott Klement
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 4:04 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: Long table column names - are they on the horizon?

IIRC, the basic problem with this is that they'd have to change size of
the "fieldname" field in the input and output specs. Right now they
provide 14 chars (the extra 4 are presumably for the (nn) suffix used in
arrays). They'd have to change the layout of I and O specs to
accomodate longer names, and I'm sure they're not eager to do that :)

At one time, I think George Farr said that they were considering adding
the longer names into externally described data structures (E DS with
EXTNAME) as a future enhancement, that way you could use the long names,
if you used the feature that lets you read directly into a data
structure. But I haven't heard anything recently about this -- and my
memory on what I heard in the past is a little fuzzy.

Of course, you could solve this problem YOURSELF, TODAY. You could
simply read the file using an SQL statement. SQL supports long field
names. Or, you could write a preprocessor that retrieves the ALIAS names
and uses them to build the code for a data structure. (Or perhaps, use
both...)


Aaron Bartell wrote:

Been doing a healthy dose of professional services the past couple weeks,
and today I think I would give my left nut just to have more than 10 chars
for column names. It doesn't help that I am trying to take 30 char long

XML

element names and try to fit them coherently into 10 chars. I feel like I
am doing a workout! :-)