Re: WARNING:Latest 4GL+Online buggy

In article <7uhjth$jrm$1@news.xmission.com>, Obnoxio The Clown <obnoxio@hotmail.com> writes > >From: Richard Spitz <Richard.Spitz@ana.med.uni-muenchen.de> >It could be a problem with the length of the string. If you know that the >string will never be longer than 20 chars so you define it as a CHAR(20), >and suddenly it's 23 chars and this happens before the prepare completes, >you might get a syntax error. But I'm just guessing. :-) > DEFINE p_site_no INTEGER DEFINE my_str CHAR(20) DEFINE my_flag char(1) SELECT apply_discount INTO my-flag from config_table where config_param = "APPLY DISCOUNTS" # Asuume my_flag Set to "Y" for this site LET my_str = "select a,b,c from t1" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 2 12345678901234567890 characters PREPARE x FROM my_str IF my_flag = "Y" THEN apply monetary discount to the job END IF AFTER THE prepare my_str = "select a , b , c , d from t1" 1 2 123456789012345678901234567 characters ^ memory space for my_flag now " " Hence suddenly after the prepare my_flag becomes " " and the discounts are not applied. Hence the costs sent to the account system are wrong and the client invoices customers wrong or calculates their internal costs wrong and management reporting figures are wrong. (This could put the customer out of business!). If you replace my_flag with integer or decimals then other weird behaviour happens. With decimals then the decimal values changes (Could be a cost for an item of stock which then gets sent to an accounting system) hence the accounts become wrong!! We do not have the resources to run a full system test of our code at this late time when we are busy upgrading other customers the y2k compliant version of the system. This is because the problem is hard to spot since no errors may be produced and the program will not necessarily crash, just produce wrong results. How the code is affected also depends upon the memory size of the variables and memory layout of variables on the 4gl runtime stack which is platform specific. We support customers on over 10 platforms many of which we do not have in-house and hence we cannot test on until we release to the customers test system.. This puts us in trouble since we can not longer order 4gl upgrades. (I could not install a 4gl upgrade onto a customer demo system tonight since we ordered the latest version and 7.30.UC1 arrived.). The original customer has a DECENTURY problem, we have interfaces to other systems which load 2 digit dates into tables from load files. These are become 1900/1901 which affect the customers live data. The interfaces cannot be changed since we would have to agree it with the company who supply the load files and they will not change things with no notice. We were advised to move to 7.30.UC1 by Informix UK since this will fix our problem. >______________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com -- David Williams