Dynamically built selection sets

[Bill Vermillion]

Jay R. Ashworth, the prominent pundit, on Thu, Jul 08 11:28  while half 
mumbling half-witicized: 

> On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 09:06:04AM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> > > Granted one could run @once processing today to get
> > > information. But where in your coding would you place it?
> > 
> > > Top or bottom??
> > 
> > All that code was in the 4.1 era.  I could NOT get them to upgrade.

> So I guess this seems like as good a place as any to slide this
> question in:

> can anyone think of *anything* that *could* be done by writing
> a selection set file from processing and then running with it,
> that could *not* be done (in these modern times :-) by merely
> writing a -v table?

The code I posted was a selection processing table, a  -v  table.
I hope that was apparent.

I had many stock selection processing tables.  They all started
with the letters SEL. And I would move them from file to file
as needed, and for when the process was against a specific
form I'd test for the from.    The only caveat was to test
for the full lenght as several forms had common prefixes.

So I would test form "name      "   and not "name"

I even moved that same process among different clients.  
It was the 'write once run anywhere' approach.  To put it more
simply - I'm lazy.  I don't like to do anything again.

> Note that I'm *not* asking the reverse question; clearly there are
> things that -v processing *can* do that any kind of selection set
> cannot, like displaying the selectors on the screen as you enter them.

And in another very complex set of selections. that involved
several file lookups, and that when a similar even like the one I
posted - eg an employee matched at least 4 itmes out of three
different subsections, if I found the matches, I would do 
a getprevious and then reprocess to pick up the selected items.

So that people knew what was going on and wondering if the program
had hung, I posted the output of the file being scanned and how
many records from that file were being processed.

Since the entire process could take 30 minutes, having output on
the screen let users know things were running. 

This was because without that the system would look like it was
hung as it would select one record and then while that was selected
go through several other files to see if there were mathches.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com