Re: Using long names

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A lot of times, I find something like this to be the result of not quite 
following a standard.

For example, a true standard is that every field with the same name has 
the same data.  While we can argue about whether ITEMDESC and CUSTDESC 
should just be DESCRIPTION, but let's assume that fields are supposed to 
be the same.  Well, if that's the case then CUSTOMER can be the customer 
number in every file in the database, and in face related records should 
have the same value.  But you have to code that way, making sure to only 
deal with related records.  The first time you grab a different record, 
you have issues.

As noted, you can get around that with prefixes.  I also like qualified 
data structures (I like them a lot, but hey, I like Java too).

It's similar to the folks who use a unique, system-generated number as 
the actual key for every file. This in theory is freaking awesome, 
because you can change customer number and every related record will 
change with it.  But it takes a bit more work whenever you're trying to 
join files together in queries.  So often the customer number is 
attached to a file somewhere and it doesn't get fixed.



On 7/25/2019 1:00 PM, Rob Berendt wrote:
> Well, thank you.
>
> I despise naming short names with a file prefix.  For examples
> IIMITEMNO
> IIMDESC
> IIMQTY
> And another file with
> ECLITMDESC
>
> This makes it impossible to query the system catalog to find the tables containing item_description.
> Hasn't anyone cracked open a RPG manual to find that if you just have to prefix you can use the PREFIX keyword on the file spec?  Why tie up precious real estate of short 10 character names with a prefix?
> I used vendor software which didn't even prefix their fields in their tables.  This was even pre ILE and they had to exhaustively rename in their programs.
>
> Rob Berendt