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Par2: Where, What
2001-07-31 -- Dennis Evans
 
. Where: is a function that returns the sequence number of a field inside a structure. (fiel record, group or a queue) The sequence number is the number of the field in order it was declared. MyGroup group F_One type F_two type F_three type end x = where(MyGroup, F_Two) x will equal two. What returns a reference to a field. An ANY type. X &= what(MyGroup, where(MyGroup, F_Two)) X is now a reference to MyGroup.F_Two What you do to F_Two is reflected in X and what you do to X is reflected in F_Two. Think of an ANY type as a pointer, technically it is not because there is some other stuff in the back ground but you and I seldom if ever need to be concerned. When the compiler creates an ANY it reserves some space some where in memory, part of the space is an address that the ANY type uses to point to other variables. In the example above the field F_Two was allocated a location in memory by the compiler, exactly where does not matter the compiler knows. When the X &= what(... is done the address part of the ANY variable is filled with the same address as the field F_Two. Now when you do X = 'Welcome to Clarion' the compiler knows this is an assignment and places the string at the location pointed to by the address in the ANY variable, which is the same location as the F_two field. You can also do comparisons F_Two = 'Some Value' if (X = 'Some Value') do this end the IF statement will evaluate to true, the compiler does the comparison on the location in memory pointed to by the ANY variable, in this case X. The advantage is that I can write procedures to process files, queues and other structures and never touch the structure. if I want the fields in a browse queue, loop x = 1 to 10 MyAny &= what(BrwX.Q, x) if (MyAny = 1000) do something with MyAny end end I can now process all the fields in a queue. As far as reading the doc's cover the ANY type fairly well and the ABC source files use the others in a several locations. Look at how the keys are assigned to the queue used by the FileManager to track key info, the WindowManager History stuff is another decent example. They are all over the source files.


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