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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-05-30 01:30, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 5/29/2018 7:12 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> 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....
> 
> If you have a record with 12 fields:
> 
> Key_1
> Key_2
> Value_1
> ...
> Value_10
> 
> then I assume that I can get the names, indexes and size for
> Key_1 and Key_2 from XABKEY (I have not tried it, but it looks
> promising), but I have no idea where I would get names, indexes
> and size for Value_1, ..., Value_10.

I think we're talking past each other. A record is all values. The keys 
are the names of the fields.
What you call "key_1" here is for me a value. (Or maybe I'm 
misunderstanding you.)
However, as Hoff pointed out, fields that are not defined as keys do not 
have this kind of meta information.

So if you have fields which are not defined as keys, then you will not 
have this information. I was in my mind looking at the case that you 
have keys defined for all the fields.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
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