RevMedia

A lot of people are unaware of some of the features provided by the system for manipulating multivalues. One of the classic features is the FORM-LIST command. This is a way of taking a field containing multivalues (such as maintained by a relational index) and producing from it an active select list which can then be used to query against a file. The syntax for FORM-LIST is

          FORM-LIST  file.name record.name field.name.containing.mvs

For example if you were maintaining a relational index on your invoices file to post all invoices for a customer to that customer record you could simply report on all indexes for that customer by typing

          FORM-LIST CUSTOMERS AB1234 7

          LIST INVOICES BY DATE DATE AMOUNT etc.

where AB1234 is the customer key that we are interested in, and 7 is the field containing the multivalued index list.

Whilst it has been updated to follow the functionality of the new XLATE ability to extract data by field name rather than by field number, it has not been updated to permit extraction of symbolics. The code listing following rectifies this. This can be used in many circumstances, for example if you had two fields in a record containing multivalues and wished to generate a union of the two you could just create a symbolic concatenating the two and FORM.LIST.S on it.

FORM.LIST.S follows the same syntax as FORM-LIST.

Code dissection follows -

0016   If the first word of the sentence is RUN then the user must have
       typed RUN BP FORM.LIST.S so rather than abort simply remove the RUN
       and the BP

0021   This can be achieved more quickly by the use of COL2( ) and [ ] but
       sacrifices some ease of maintenance

0024   Standard Boolean check to ensure that all parameters required have at
       least been filled in, even if incorrectly.

0028   CALCULATEX has the same functionality as the CALCULATE function but
       it does not require that @DICT and @RECORD be loaded. This makes it
       easier to use in situations where information is required from
       several different files for one report. The calling syntax is

             CALCULATEX (A,B,C,D,E)

       where
             A is the field name
             B is the dictionary file variable
             C is the id of the record
             D is the record itself
             E is the MV number to return (EG @MV)

0030   MAKE.LIST is a system subroutine documented in the AREV 1.1 Addendum
       which takes a field mark delimited list and makes it into a select
       list in the nominated cursor.

0031   @SAVE.SELECT is a system variable documented in the AREV 1.1 Addendum
       which instructs the system to return the active select list to TCL
       rather than discarding it.