MS-DOS: Pro*C VARCHARS

Apologies, I shot past the original message, so I can't remember who had the problem. But basically their Pro*C precompiler was converting:

VARCHAR *foo[7];

• to: **

struct
{
  ...
} *foo;

This is *not* an error of the MS-DOS version of the Pro*C pre-compiler. I think you'll find all Pro*C precompilers do the same. The workaorund (and you need a lot of them with ORACLE!), is to #define some conversion macros. We hit a problem when we tried to pass VARCHARS (which are global structures, after the precompiler has been applied) by reference to another function. The solution was to #define VARCHAR-TO-STRING macros (and vica versa). Next, convert the VARCHAR to a STRING and *then* you can pass the string by reference. Phew!

/* NB: The line continuation slashes, and curly braces are very important */
#define VARCHAR_TO_STR(to,from) \

{                                           \
    strncpy (to, from.arr, from.len);       \ 
    to[from.len] = '\0';                    \

#define STR_TO_VARCHAR(to,from) \

{                                           \
    strcpy (to.arr, from);                  \
    to.len = strlen(from);                  \

BTW, if all you need is some sort of 2-dimensional VARCHAR then Pro*C does allow them:

VARCHAR foo[10][7];

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