Help with VARCHAR needed

[Leonard_Berkowitz@harvardpilgrim.org]

Terry Curran wrote:

<<I believe that VARCHAR only exists because Oracle has a VARCHAR
datatype,  I don't think there is any valid use for it as PowerHouse
treats all string as fixed lengths, so VARCHAR*2000 will be the same as
CHAR*2000.

If you are outputting to Excel, then the fixed column format is probably
fine. Its one of the formats that excel is OK with importing.  If you
start doing CSV files or anything else fancy like that then you will
have to start converting numbers to characters, etc.  The only drawback
is that if you use the REPORT statement to output strings then the
maximum page witdh is 255. Generally I would uses a SUBFILE as the
output format, you would then need to adjust the format , and convert
everything to s character string. If you use a subfile in this way then
you probably should use a CSV format, and terminate each record with a
<CR><LF>, if you pack your strings to remove excess space then it
doesn't matter about having trailing spaces in the subfile records -
providing you end each set of data with <CR><LF>.
>>

Terry, thanks for your note. Yes my intention is to use a subfile,
ultimately. I am just using QUIZ to report to validate my logic.

Leonard
--
Leonard S. Berkowitz
Perot Health Care Systems
(Harvard Pilgrim Health Care account)
voice: 617-509-1212
fax: 617-509-1955
pager: 781-226-2431