Results of SQR Upgrade Testing

["White, Denise" <DWHITE@SYSTEMS.TEXTRON.COM>]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my post last month about upward
compatibility between versions 3 and 4!  It was very helpful.  We have now
completed our testing of in-house-written SQR programs, and I thought I
would share with you what I found.  There were some minor printing
differences between the two versions, but nothing serious.

1)  I had never noticed it, but version 3 was inconsistent in its use of
edit masks, depending on the type of field being printed.  If I had an edit
mask of 99.99, and the value was .5, a &col (either printed with implicit
PRINT from the select, or using the &col name later with explicit PRINT)
would print as .50, while a #var would print as 0.50.  An exception was a
value of 0, which printed as 0.00 no matter what.  Version 4 is consistent,
and prints 0.50 no matter which type of field is being printed.

2)  I was printing an age (&spouse_age retrieved in another select) using a
mask of 99.  In version 3, it printed as blank if there was no spouse and a
null value was returned.  In version 4, it printed as 0.  Easily fixed by
changing the mask to b9.

3)  I had a program that printed several reports in succession to the same
.lis file.  Several of the reports had no output.  In version 3, I did not
get any pages at all for these reports.  In version 4, I got pages with
headers but no detail.

4)  I think most of you are probably aware that if you print multiple .lis
files concurrently, version 3 will name the second report rptname.l01, while
version 4 will name it rptname_01.lis.

5)  This one bugs me, and if anyone has an answer, I would appreciate it!  I
have a report that uses the wrap parameter on a long character field.  There
are two lines in my header, and I use BEGIN-HEADING 2.  In version 3, if a
page break occurs in the middle of printing the wrapped long character
field, the continuation starts on line 3 of the next page, under the header.
In version 4, it continues on the 2nd line of the heading.  Because of my
placement of the field, it is not overlapping anything on my header, but it
does not look good.  I have tried various things, like making the header
definition 3 lines, but whenever I change anything like that, the shifting
of the lines results in my not having any wrapped fields over a page break,
so I can't tell if they work.

6)  I had asked about "alter session set nls_date_format = 'DD-MON-YYYY';"
not working any more.  The answer turned out to be using the -zif parameter
to point to an .ini file that has '"SQR_DB_DATE_FORMAT=DD-MON-YYYY" in it.

7)  Sorting seems to be working a little bit differently.  When sorting
multiple records with the same sort keys, they came out in different orders
in the two versions.  This did not affect the outcome of the processing, it
just made it more difficult to compare the results.

I don't know if anyone will find any of this interesting or helpful, but I
wanted to give something back to the group.  Sometimes I do know the answer
to someone's question, but because I read them in digest form, someone else
always has given the answer already by the time I read it!

Denise White
Sr IT Application Developer
Textron Systems