This morning I was tasked with retrieving the location of inventory within a specific warehouse. I wrote the following code that is part of a larger procedure that creates a warehouse transfer document.
:LOC = '0'; /* default value */ SELECT WAREHOUSES.LOCNAME INTO :LOC FROM WAREHOUSES, WARHSBAL WHERE WAREHOUSES.WARHS = WARHSBAL.WARHS AND WARHSBAL.PART = :PART AND WAREHOUSES.WARHSNAME = 'Main';
When the procedure containing this code was run, there was a complaint that location R does not exist for warehouse Main. This error was doubly confusing - at first, I thought that the R might refer to the part's type, which would make no sense whatsoever. When I ran the snippet in Windbi, the result was something like R.1.2, which was when I understood what was happening.
:LOC is initially set to the single character '0', for if the retrieval fails (for example, if the part has no inventory) then at least :LOC will have a value that is guaranteed to exist. Unfortunately, as I discovered several years ago1, initialising a string with a single character confuses Priority who thinks that this is a character variable, not a string, and so saving further values into this variable will only save the first character.
The solution is to have an initialisation line at the beginning, like :LOC = '00000000' (I imagine that the length doesn't matter too much, as long as it's longer than one character. Once this line had been added, the addition to the procedure worked flawlessly.
I notice that I wrote in the earlier blog that this issue had been fixed in version 21. I'm not sure with which version I was working today (it was for an external client), but it was web-based and probably not less than version 23.
Internal links
[1] 51
