Can metacharacters be used in a select prompt?

[Deskin, Bob]

Without having someone look into the code, I don't know exactly what it
means. But I believe that everything after the @ in the CHOOSE is ignored.

There are two possible solutions. One is to change the generic retrieval
character in the dictionary. If you find that you're using @ in data a lot,
this may be the easiest.

The other is to use the NOGENERIC keyword which specifically tells the
PowerHouse component to ignore the generic retrieval character and treat it
as data.

This latter option came about since many MPE/iX customers use substructured
indexes because KSAM doesn't have multi-segment indexes. So if the index is
made up of a character item and an integer, retrieval problems happen if the
integer value is the generic retrieval character or some bit pattern
combination thereof. For example, if it's a two byte integer and the first
byte is the @ bit pattern, the second part gets ignored (which would
coincide with what I said at the beginning). We introduced NOGENERIC to
avoid these problems.

Bob Deskin              
PowerHouse Web Product Manager, Application Development Tools, Cognos Inc.
bob.deskin@cognos.com (613) 738-1338 ext 7268 FAX: (613) 727-1178
3755 Riverside Drive P.O. Box 9707 Stn. T, Ottawa ON K1G 4K9 CANADA

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Sharman [mailto:chris.sharman@ccagroup.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 3:41 AM
To: Tim Cummings; powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: RE: Can metacharacters be used in a select prompt?



>Quick question:  HP3000 PH 8.1.9 C2
> 
>I know that you can use something like bell@ in a field when supplying
select >values in select mode, but is there a way to supply metacharacter
patterns?  I >know I can write the code to make this work but I don't want
to write code.  I >want to use native PH to do the work.
 
Yes.

The user should enter % to say treat this expression as a pattern.

eg "%^(#|^)* *" for an identifier (alpha optionally followed by
alphanumerics, with space padding to the end of the field).

On a similar line, does anyone know how to have metacharacters treated
normally when entering a choose parm ?
Eg, we have email addresses keyed, but the find doesn't work, because the
"@" always gets treated specially (PH 710G3, VMS 7.3). I'd thought it was
only special at the end of an expression, but that doesn't seem to be the
case. In fact I don't know what it means in the middle of an expression, but
it finds precious little.

Chris


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