Re: Using one Update Program

Comments in-line.


Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


On Jan 19, 2011, at 9:37 AM, Jeff Buening wrote:

Was not for sure if compiling "UPDATEPRO"
and not "PROGRAMA" would cause that new field in FILEA to be spaced out or
not with the 01 level MOVE in "UPDATEPRO"?

No - it won't be space filled - it will be garbage filled (the garbage may of course if you are lucky be spaces!). All that is being passed to UPDATEPRO is the pointer to the beginning of the field. Since that field is longer in UPDATEPRO than PROGRAMA when you do the move you will pick up whatever garbage happens to be beyond the end of the original storage.

So I am thinking setting up like this will work in reducing compiles. Even
though I added a field to the FILEA, it didn't mess up the call between the
two programs or Read, Rewrite etc?

The fact that nothing blew up doesn't mean it worked correctly.

Am I assuming correctly or can anyone tell me I might be missing something
or could have problems with this?

You're getting garbage in the new fields whenever you write or update them. That's rarely a good idea.

In my opinion the amount of time you might save in recompiles is likely to disappear in a hurry when a weird bug is introduced by such coding techniques.

Lying to the compiler is rarely a good idea. The only time I would even consider this approach worthwhile is if the file is only being read and the calling program doesn't need the data.