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

["Aaron Bartell" <albartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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 :)

I thought I and O specs were deprecated?  People still use those?  <tic>

> You could simply read the file using an SQL statement.  
True.

> 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...)

Not a bad idea for initial creation, but maintenance would be a pain.

Guess I will just add this to my list of "top ten things I want in RPG"  :-)

Later,
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces+albartell=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces+albartell=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Scott Klement
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 4:04 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: 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! :-)