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ujj1
Guest
Good discussion and points about the database and Matt Baker's comment. For the purpose of this dicussion, let's exclude the database concern since even with character variables and key field lengths, a developer will need to handle assigning large strings to an indexed character field. The DB field datatype for large strings would be clobs. The DB field datatype for 32KB strings would be character of which one would need to ensure assignments would respect index limits (188 bytes or 1024 bytes depending on whether large indexes are set I think). From strictly an ABL standpoint, I think the biggest concerns would be performance and built-in ABL statement/function support. I think most ABL functions support longchar but there are some limitations. A simple example is: define variable myLongChar as longchar no-undo init 'abc'. message myLongChar view-as alert-box. This will error because longchars aren't supported in input/output operations.
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