Re: What are the dangers of changing the return type of a subprocedure?

Not sure I understand. The format of our invoice numbers are
yyyy-mm-xxxxxxxxx where the x's are sequential. All I am doing is moving
where the yyyy-mm is being added. The output is the same in the end. My
only concern was changing from decimal to character and if something would
scream at me for doing that.

--
Mike Wills
http://mikewills.me


On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Carel Teijgeler <coteijgeler@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Mike,
.
The problem is not the return value.

Your problem would be the value of "dInvoice"

Invoice numbers should be sequential without gaps. yo are changing the
format and lay out of the value thus breaking the rules. Do not think the
financial department, auditors and other financial control agencies would
like that.

Regards,
Carel Teijgeler

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 10-2-2012 at 9:54 Mike Wills wrote:

I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote it (I'm sure I thought I was

cleaver) but I wrote a subprocedure that pulled the next invoice number.

That in itself is good, but then in the calling code, I had to do this:

dInvoice = %subst(%char(%date():*iso):1:7) + '-' +

%subst(%editc(GetNextInvoiceNumber():'X'):2:7);

WHAT THE?!? Ideally it should be:

dInvoice = GetNextInvoiceNumber();

Normally I wouldn't re-factor things like this, but now other software

will soon be creating invoices and needs to get invoice numbers. What
dangers

are there in changing the subprocedure from a decimal return field to a

character? I have tracked down all of the programs that call this function

(that I know of). Or should I create a new subprocedure and leave the old

one just in case I missed something? For course if we change the format of

the number, we will quickly have problems that way.

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