RE: HELP! Need to Reference Field Names as Variables

Steven, ____________________________________________________________________________ rem radioterapia, which I immeritately manage, seldom agrees with what I say marco greco (Catania, Italy) Work: marcog@ctonline.it rem radioterapia 39 95 447828 fax 446558 (was mar.greco@agora.stm.it) Achea 39 95 503117 Steven, rather than passing a record to your function, try to pass an array with name and value of the columns on which you wish to operate (No need to access systables & syscolumns, obviously). From there on, it should be very easy to prepare each statement. The downside is that you have to populate the array with brute force... HTH, MArco --- On 14 Nov 1996 18:46:19 GMT Steven Frank <stevef@relation.com> wrote: Here is what I'm trying to do. I need to perform a few simple actions on each of the fields in a given table. Unfortunately, the table has a very large number of fields and typing a 4 line code segment for each field is a major pain. I have included a sample function below that reads the list of field names from the SYSTABLES and SYSCOLUMNS tables and then loops through each. The looping structure works fine (i.e. I can retrieve the field names and loop through each of them). The problem is that I don't know how to reference the field name that I have read into my variable. The usual notation for referencing a field is TABLE.FIELD where FIELD is a constant. I need FIELD to be a variable. Replies via email would be greatly appreciated (stevef@relation.com) Here is the commented function; # This function checks each field for a NULL value and replaces it w/a space # The parameter is a RECORD type variable Function CheckForNull(lMT_Department) # Declare variable for parameter # The variable lColName will hold the field name read from the query Define lMT_Department Record Like MT_Department.*, lColName Char(50) # Declare a cusor to run through the specified table and return each # column name - This has been tested in ISQL and works fine Declare NullSelect Cursor For Select colname From systables, syscolumns Where systables.tabname = "mt_department" And systables.tabid = syscolumns.tabid # Here we go...getting each column name out of the specified table ForEach NullSelect Into lColName # Here is the problem # I (obviously) get a compile time error # 'lColName is not a member of table blah blah' # but this is what I want to do If lMT_Department.lColName Is Null Then Let lMT_Department.lColName = " " End If End ForEach Return lMT_Department.* End Function -----------------End of Original Message-----------------