In this blog, I showed a way to fool the HTML document generator by passing it one linked file, but then creating a new linked file and inserting into it only the records that one wants. I am in the process of upgrading our Priority version, and the program that checks procedures gave me an error message for this procedure: "Unresolved identifier TEST_WWWSHOWCUSTA.PAR". This is a mystifying message as the procedure works perfectly and of course PAR is a recognised identifier.
I discovered that the error came from this line, the first in the procedure:
:OLDPAR = :$.PAR;
This saves the value of the parameter holding the list of customers (or
whatever) in the local variable 'oldpar'; internally the value of the parameter
is the name of an external file somewhere on the server and so can be viewed as a regular string. If I commented out this
line, the error message would disappear, although of course, the procedure
wouldn't work. This led me to believe that the error message was probably a bug
in the syntax checker: I was using syntax that the checker didn't recognise.
My colleague Yitzchok suggested an alternative (and a more SQL-like) syntax:
SELECT :$.PAR INTO :OLDPAR FROM DUMMY;
This has the same effect but also passes the syntax check. Once I discovered this, I quickly changed the three or four procedures that I had written using this 'replacing PAR' technique so that they too would not fail the syntax check.
