Re: Long table column names - are they on the horizon?

IIRC, the basic problem with this is that they'd have to change size of the "fieldname" field in the input and output specs. Right now they provide 14 chars (the extra 4 are presumably for the (nn) suffix used in arrays). They'd have to change the layout of I and O specs to accomodate longer names, and I'm sure they're not eager to do that :)

At one time, I think George Farr said that they were considering adding the longer names into externally described data structures (E DS with EXTNAME) as a future enhancement, that way you could use the long names, if you used the feature that lets you read directly into a data structure. But I haven't heard anything recently about this -- and my memory on what I heard in the past is a little fuzzy.

Of course, you could solve this problem YOURSELF, TODAY. You could simply read the file using an SQL statement. SQL supports long field names. Or, you could write a preprocessor that retrieves the ALIAS names and uses them to build the code for a data structure. (Or perhaps, use both...)


Aaron Bartell wrote:

Been doing a healthy dose of professional services the past couple weeks,
and today I think I would give my left nut just to have more than 10 chars
for column names. It doesn't help that I am trying to take 30 char long XML
element names and try to fit them coherently into 10 chars. I feel like I
am doing a workout! :-)