Re: Long DB2 Column Names from RPG

Barbara

I'm not asking for this, just wondering. There is a continuation we can use in
D-specs - an ellipsis - that lets us use really long names for any variable and
for procedures. Could this not be put into I and O specs? This does not require
free-form at this time.

Have a happy US holiday on Monday!
Vern

-------------- Original message --------------
From: Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>

albartell wrote:

On an airplane coming back from RPGWorld right now. As I am doing some
offline WDSC DDS PF creation I thought of Barbara's comments awhile back
concerning the most popular feature in an RPG survey a few years ago (i.e.
%trim enhancements). That got me thinking... man I sure would like to be
able to use long file field names in RPG. The 10 char limitation is getting
really old and I was just wondering if anybody knew if we would be able to
use SQL named fields or fields created/named with the ALIAS keyword anytime
in the near future. That would be on my top 10 list of things I want to see
in RPG this coming year.

Aaron, there probably won't be ALIAS support in the near future. The
reason that ALIAS names aren't currently supported for
externally-described files is because of the generated I and O specs
which only have room for 14-character names. Free-form I and O specs or
a major kludge in the compiler would be required to support 30 character
names. Nothing is impossible, but it's not on the horizon.

Now that RPG supports data-structure I/O for externally-described files,
it's feasible to avoid generating the I and O specs for a file, which
would avoid the 14-character problem and allow ALIAS to be supported for
the file. (Although presumably you'd only see the field names if you
defined a DS using LIKEREC.)

There's no current impediment to supporting ALIAS names for
externally-described data structures, but even that's not likely for the
near future, unfortunately.

A Pollyanna thought: Whenever the 10 character limit gets you down, just
think back to the old 6-character limit. To me, 6 seemed much more
restrictive compared to 10, than 10 now seems compared to 30.

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