Reading Selection Sets

[Keith' Weatherhead]

Doug Luurs wrote:

> When you are running a report, is there a way to get the fields and
> values defined in the selection set you are running currently?  
> 
> (Short of reading the selection set of course-but that may be different
> due  to the person changing the values by hand-which is what I want to
> catch)
> 
> Douglas Luurs
>   Systems Programmer
>   Borisch Mfg Corp
> 
> Voice: 616-554-9820 x143
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Doug,

This question has been asked or the process attempted so many times 
over the years that I cannot believe that it has never been 
addressed by TPTB thru all the variations from The Small Computer 
Co. to FPTech.  I know of know way "to-date" to do this other than 
to read the actual Selection Set off the HD.  If you know that the 
process needs this info, do it in a @once or some early event and 
pass the Selection Set name into one of the @p? parameters on the
command line.  What would be very hard to do, unless it has happened 
lately and I just haven't looked at I haven't had the need is to see 
if a new @ system variable already contains the name of the 
Selection Set used.  The question is can it capture the Set Name if 
you manually go thru the Selection Set->Extended Selection and 
either enter criteria or Load an Existing Set?

Anyway, now, especially since the 5.x version and having System 
Arrays... why can't the current Selection Set, in-use be a System Array?

Why can't a variable be set @SS for example, that contains the 
Selection Set name from the command line -OR- Loaded from an 
existing set?

Why can't it contain a fixed string that cannot be a normal filename 
name, such as '*USER*' if you entered an Extended Set data, but have 
not saved it to a file for future reference?

Why is there NOT a command set to build, save, and remove Selection 
Sets from within processing?  Yes you can do it with file I/O, but 
why does FP itself not make it available to the programmer? This 
would let you walk the user thru a selection process, store it... 
use it thru multiple steps (reports, updates, etc.) and then remove 
it when finished... you could do your own naming for the series to 
prevent it from hitting any previously existing Set name.

If the example @SS was non-blank, then maybe a @SSDATA array would 
exist which would be 13 elements long, just the like Selection 
Criteria Screen... the widths are already known... would not be a 
big deal to do at all... I would think any FPTECH C-coder would have 
MORE than enough ability to implement ! ! !

Feature ver 1 - @SS and @SSDATA
Feature ver 2 - Be able to update @SSDATA and essentially be able to 
do the equivalent of a "RESET" command.

The results could be very interesting ! ! !

Regards,
Keith
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Keith F. Weatherhead                   keithw at ddltd.com

Discus Data, LTD                  Voice: (815) 237-8467
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