Re: Max length of a VARYING field

----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Klement" <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries" <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: Max length of a VARYING field

Remember that VARYING also applies to UCS2 and Graphic fields in
addition to alpha fields. So %size(MyVary) - %prefixSize(MyVary) isn't
always enough. You'd also need %size(MyVary) / %size(OneChar) -
%prefixSize(MyVary) and it just gets uglier and uglier.

Yes, of course, it's never that easy is it :-)

Whereas, something like %len(MyVary: *max) (or your suggestion of
%varysize() which does the same thing) that would give the maximum
amount of CHARACTERS (not bytes) in one fell swoop would be much less ugly.

I actually like your idea of parameters for the 3 bif's, rather than a new bif. Keeps it to one bif per function. Just one thing, to be consistent, why not make the

%len(myVaryFld:*MAX)

%len(myVaryFld:*DATA)

When IBM created the %size() BIF they really didn't do it for the
purpose of maximum length of the string... It just works out that way
with the alpha data type because there's one character per byte.

%size() is supposed to report the number of bytes of actual storage.
For example, if you use a BASED field and use dynamic memory allocation,
%size() should report the number of bytes you need to allocate, and
the number of bytes you need to offset the pointer to skip past the
field, etc.

And yes, that makes sense.

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