RE: generic file display program

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2001, john smith wrote:

> very far from perfect though. The biggest hurdle,
> which I have not solved yet, is the handling of
> displaying digits   (grin) , there's no SQL in-built
> function that could convert it to a string  but with
> the appropriate editing (double grin!). e,g if I pass
> as a parameter 'select invnum || digits(amount) ||
> custno from FILE into YLINE', I can get something like
> 'INV1234  000120900  CUSTOMERX' as output instead of a
> prettier 'INV1234  1209.00  CUSTOMERX'
> (If anyone knows how to circumvent this...)

This is precisely why multidimensional arrays are needed.  The sql select
can return the data into a multidimensional array which is ALLOC'd by the
api.  Now you have an array of strings containing your values.  So the
first record returned is row[0] where row[0] is a string.  row[1] contains
a string with the next field in it.  Then editing numbers is no problem.
Since all results are strings you would have to convert numeric results to
a numeric data type, but that is easy: eval number=atoi(string).  You
could use the BIFs then to %editc() your result or whatever else you
wanted.  Dynamic select statements become a breeze because the size
and number of the result does not need to be known.

A second topic here is how to make the screen dynamically change its
layout based on the results.  I even have a need for this now.  I have set
up 'preferences' files that contain user-customizable parameters for our
applications.  Not every application has the same kind of customizable
components so it doesn't make sense to put it all in one file or on one
screen.  But I would like a program (ONE program) that can take any
preference file and display the contents, allowing the user to change
them.  Not every file has the same number of preferences or the same type,
so I want a program that can layout the screen nicely and only show those
preferences that exist for a given file.  I suspect that to do this I'm
going to have to write the 5250 stream myself.  Any ideas?

James Rich
james@eaerich.com