RE: VARYING fields

<<Forwarded from MIDRANGE-L>>

> From: Barbara Morris
>
> Had you already been using VARYING?  It's also very
> powerful, both for parameters and for general use.

All I can say about VARYING is... wow.  I mean, serious wow.

I changed a field one of my files to use VARLEN.  In my prototypes, I've
been using an externally described DS and a LIKE defines for that parameter,
and magically this parameter is now VARYING.  No more trims.  String
manipulation is much cleaner and easier to read.

I'm floored.  I wish I'd known about this sooner, because it would have
alleviated a lot of headaches.  No longer do I have to worry about buffer
overflows when making long strings.

Not only that, the CONST keyword will automatically resize the VARYING
fields when they need to be fixed length (obviously, truncation is an issue,
but that's programmatic, and would be a problem no matter what - but I don't
have to constantly %trim and "+" while I'm working towards the final field
contents).

It's 11PM, and I've completely revamped major parts of my file manipulation
logic to use this, and I'm still finding cool nuances.  I wish I had another
two days to redo everything, but other work beckons.

One question: is there an easy way to bring in field definitions via an
externally described data structure WITHOUT allocating the space for the
buffer?  I've got to believe that some application of the BASED keyword will
allow me to do this, but I can't figure it out.  Too many brain cells taken
up with VARYING <grin>.

Joe