Re: Adding columns to existing Infor files.

John,

What should I be comparing, and why? Is this an attempt to find out what
changed? I'm not trying to find out past tense. I am trying to decide on
the possible negative ramifications of adding additional columns to
existing tables.

At first I thought I dodged the bullet since Infor seemed to have used the
logicals for all traditional RPG I/O. Their logicals select the
individual columns from the base tables and avoid any *ALL concept. This
is a good thing. No programs would blow due to a record format level
check.
But then it was pointed out to me that Infor does occasionally use the
dreaded:
select * from mytable into :mytableDS
in which mytableDS is an externally defined data structure. At one time
this would have only been a 'soft' error. But many moons ago IBM came out
with a ptf or new release which made this a hard halt if the 'from' table
was altered and now had more columns at the end than were in the data
structure. Oh, it's a really simple fix. Simply recompile the program
and it will use the new external data structure. I'm not saying the
mountain is insurmountable, you just have to know whether the changes you
want are worth the pain.

As far as any concerns about Infor screwing up the additional columns I'm
somewhat confident they wouldn't. For example if they do a traditional
RPG input, modify some columns and update the row the columns I an
interested in are outside of their control and shouldn't be altered by
that. But I would definitely test that out.

I have zero interest in a "needle in a haystack" solution.

Rob Berendt