RE: Pointer question

Yes you could probably come up with a way to do this using pointers.
But any way you look at it there needs to be a decision made somewhere
as to which date you want and a value returned, the actual date value or
a pointer. Because of that, I really don't see pointers providing a
benefit in this situation. I'd go with the select group.

If the issue is having the select group cluttering up a section of code
put the select into a procedure that returns the proper date value based
on the input value passed and call it where needed.

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of sjl
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2008 12:26 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Pointer question

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a pointer expert...

One of my co-workers is writing a program in which he needs to access
several different fields within a record in a file depending on a
soft-coded criteria that is fed into the program, and he was hoping that
he could somehow use a pointer to accomplish this and thus have a more
elegant solution.

The file has six different date fields:

DATE1
DATE2
DATE3
DATE4
DATE5
DATE6

and depending of the value of the input field (I'll call it WHICHDATE),
he wants to be able to set a pointer to one of these six different date
fields in order to reference the value of the field, instead of using a
SELECT group with six different branches...

So, if WHICHDATE = 'DATE1', he wants the pointer to reference the
address of field DATE1, if WHICHDATE = 'DATE2', he wants the pointer to
reference the address of field DATE2, etc.

Does this even make sense? Is this possible?
As for me, I'd just use SELECT...

Regards,
sjl

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