AW: Long DB2 Column Names from RPG

Hi,

Free-form I and O specs or a major kludge in the compiler would be

required to support 30 character names.

Beginning with release V5R4 column names can be defined up to 128
characters.
But if it's not planned it doesn't matter if a column name can have 30 or
128 characters ;)

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards

Birgitta Hauser

"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." (Les
Brown)
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." (Derek Bok)
"What is worse than training your staff and losing them? Not training them
and keeping them!"

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Im
Auftrag von Barbara Morris
Gesendet: Friday, May 25, 2007 21:05
An: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: Re: Long DB2 Column Names from RPG


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.