RE: Text on report

All you have to do with the array is make it arbitrarily large (enough to
hold the text any way) and mark the end with a delimiter like '//end' or
something equally creative.  Once you start thinking in terms of control
codes, it's like Bank Street Writer or Text 38 all over again--possibilities
are limitless.<G>  Condition the loop on finding the end marker.  It does
involve incrementing the array index  manually and watching for overflow,
though.  Just having gone through a round of sending out batches of e-mail
with the text in a file, I can see some advantages to the array.  You can
edit the text and get AS/400 WYSIWYG.  

'Course, if you put the text in a source member, you can actually edit it
with Text 38.<g>

Again, it's a matter of taste, and whether the text is likely to change.   

-----Original Message-----
From: bmorris@ca.ibm.com [mailto:bmorris@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2000 4:02 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Text on report





>Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 11:44:41 -0700
>From: Jim Langston <jlangston@conexfreight.com>
>
>I have a report to generate that has quite a bit of text on it.
>A whole paragraph, basically.
>
>My question is, how do you feel would be the best way to get
>this long text data into my program to print on the page?
>There are a number of ways I could do it, including puting
>it in a file, then opening it and reading it a line at a
>time into a variable and printing it out.  Or I could do a
>Compile time array and stick it on the bottom of my program.
> ...

Jim, unless you're absolutely positive you'll never want to to
change the text, put it in a file, and just read it line by line.
If you use an array, you have to worry about the exact number
of lines (too many, and you get an error; too few, and you
have to make sure you don't print a blank line).

I'm not sure what the folks suggesting named constants or EVAL
had in mind, but it seems to me that if you code the text as
a single long string, you would have to write extra code to
re-separate it into lines.

>There is another type of array, I think, where I could
>create the file and then load the array with the
>information at run time from the file, though
>I've never done that before.
> ...

What you're referring to here is called a pre-run array.  These
are ok for reading things like messages or month-names where the
number of elements is well-defined, but for text that has a
varying number of lines, they're awkward.

Barbara Morris


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