CLIPPED doesn't work with NCHAR fields in ACE

Hi Informixers, a new problem just cropped up on me after my upgrade to IDS 7.30: I just discovered that all CHAR and VARCHAR fields were changed to NCHAR and NVARCHAR by the engine, even in those databases where I had explicitly NOT set COLLCHAR=1 before loading. I'm not quite sure anymore (after two days of working on the conversion, with very little sleep), but I believe that this didn't happen right after the dbimport, but sometime afterwards (maybe during backup?). Anyway, it seems I'm stuck with that, and I could live with it if I hadn't stumbled across this nasty error: ACE reports (INFORMIX-SQL Version 7.20UD1) that worked just fine before now crash with the error message: -9001 Only columns of type CHARACTER may be subscripted or printed without trailing blanks. Either you have attempted to subscript, or apply the CLIPPED function to, a non-character variable; or else you specified a variable to have the wrong data type. Is this expected behavior? From the documentation, I had the impression that NCHAR is equivalent to CHAR for all normal means, except for collating purposes. What can I do to get around this? Regards, Richard -- +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | Dr. Richard Spitz | INTERNET: spitz@ana.med.uni-muenchen.de | | EDV-Gruppe Anaesthesie | Tel : +49-89-7095-6110 <-- NEW! | | Klinikum Grosshadern | FAX : +49-89-7095-8886 | | 81366 Munich, Germany | GSM : +49-172-8933578 | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+

Sorry to bother you with my posting. Just found out from TECHINFO that this is a known bug: #72293. It's been around since SQL 4.20 and 6.04 and hasn't been fixed. Informix doesn't suggest a workaround, but at least I found one for my specific circumstances: Define a CHAR variable in the ACE report and assign the NCHAR field to that variable with the LET statement. Regards, Richard -- +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+ | Dr. Richard Spitz | INTERNET: spitz@ana.med.uni-muenchen.de | | EDV-Gruppe Anaesthesie | Tel : +49-89-7095-6110 <-- NEW! | | Klinikum Grosshadern | FAX : +49-89-7095-8886 | | 81366 Munich, Germany | GSM : +49-172-8933578 | +--------------------------+------------------------------------------+