[Info-vax] The best VMS features, was: Re: openvms renaming file

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-05-29 01:16, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 5/28/2018 4:08 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> Applications could be clever enough to actually refer to fields based 
>> on names, instead of just using fixed, known, chunks of the record. 
>> RMS do have names for the fields, which you can set and read.
> 
> Both keys and values or only keys?
> 
> I suspect key info is in XABKEY, but where do you find value info?

What do you mean by value info? The values are in the individual records 
obviously. And the key info will tell you which bytes in the record that 
contains the value. Or are you talking about the type of the value? 
Which also also stored with they key info.

Not entirely sure what you are thinking of....

That said, you certainly have a point in that there is no standard 
library (that I know of) which abstracts this away for you, so you'll 
have to do it yourself, unless you use something like Datatrieve to 
access your RMS files, which it can do, and at which point you do get 
this abstraction again.

A bit surprised to hear that VMS don't have an equivalent to RMSDEF, 
RMSCNV and RMSIFL which comes with RMS-11.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol