Re: 4GL Version 6.x : Bugs, or just worms?

rferdy@kuwait.net (Rudy Fernandes) wrote: :We have recently upgraded from 5.0SE to 7.2 ONLINE and RDS 4.1 to 6.04. : :1. We are having problems with the 'SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE' statement under :some conditions. : :Most of our reports have a FIRST PAGE HEADER. To prevent data from :being printing on the first page, we have statements like these : :ON EVERY ROW (or BEFORE GROUP OF ...) : IF PAGENO = 1 THEN : SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE : END : :Informix fails to execute the SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE under 6.04. After :much perspiration, we discovered that the following works. : :ON EVERY ROW : IF PAGENO = 1 THEN : SKIP 1 LINE : SKIP TO TOP OF PAGE : END IF : :What's going on? If nothing is printed before skip to top of page (outside a page header) the runtime knows that it is at the top of page, and doesn't execute another one. This is standard behaviour. Your skip 1 line means something is printed, and it skips to the next top of page, in effect creating a blank page. Why do you want to prevent something from beeing printed on the first page? It it's to create separators between printouts there are many other methods available. :2. VARCHAR. In our ongoing effort to improve the performance of our :ONLINE engine, we decided to switch a set of columns from CHAR to :VARCHAR (more rows per page, etc). : :Following this, we were shocked to find that SELECTs on that column : returned NOTFOUND. We quickly discovered that the problem occurred : if the variable being used in the select was defined as LIKE : tabname.VARCHARcol. If we changed the variable to a CHAR, it worked : fine. : :Can anybody shed some light on this extraordinary behaviour? Strange. We haven't used varchar so far, so I don't know. Hope someone else can explain it. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org