Working with variable length fields in VISION:Results.

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• Vision:Results

Issue/Introduction

When records are variable in length, the user can specify the LENGTH parameter on the FILE statement to determine the record length. However, when fields within the record are not consistent in length, users are sometimes unsure of how to manipulate the data as desired.

Resolution

VISION:Results does not have a variable length field type, but users frequently have a fixed length field where the content is of variable length and blanks fill the remainder. In these cases, positioning is easily handled using indexing.

If there is a field with data which may be up to 40 characters long and you want to append a literal at the end of the data.

Here is an example of how to do it:

OPTION STRUCTURED2 

* the 'structured' option is required for the DO loop below

 FILE SYSIN CARDS                                                             
     VNAME    40                                                              
 WORKAREA                                                                     
     LITERAL  15 VALUE ",VOL=SER=VOLUME"                                      
     DESIRED  65

* initialize the result field and index

MOVE ' ' TO DESIRED                                                          
   INW = 0               

* move entire input field to output field

 MOVE VNAME TO DESIRED  

* loop through input field until blank is encountered

 DOWHILE VNAME (INW) NE SPACE                                                 
   INW = INW + 1                                                             
 ENDDO       
 

* when the loop terminates, INW contains length of the data

 MOVE LITERAL TO DESIRED (INW)                                             
                                                                              
 LIST VNAME INW DESIRED                                                       
                                                                              
 FIN                                                                          
 FILE.NAME.ONE                                                                 
 FILE.NAME.THREE                                                               
/*   

This results in the following output:

VNAME               INW    DESIRED 
FILE.NAME.ONE       13     FILE.NAME.ONE,VOL=SER=VOLUME
FILE.NAME.THREE     15     FILE.NAME.THREE,VOL=SER=VOLUME

Additional Information

For more information, please refer to the Indexing section of Chapter 14 of the VISION:Results Reference Guide.