Re: Oracle Forms 2.3 question on insert feature (data entry)

Michael Winters (winters_at_access.digex.net) wrote:
: This might be a dumb question, but here goes: A user is trying to insert
: commas in name fields, to clean up the data. For example,
: "Mr. John and Lorena Bobbit" might need to be changed to
: "Mr. John, and Lorena Bobbit". When the "," after John is added, you
: have to erase all the characters after the "t" in Bobbit to allow
: any character to be inserted. This is because we are in block mode on
: an IBM 4381 under VM/CMS. Is there any parameter in SQL*Forms 2.3 that
: can be tweeked to fix this? The user has hundreds of records to add
: commas too, so any subtraction of necessary key strokes would be
: greatly appreciated. What it boils down to is querying up the name field
: with trailing nulls. Now, it is possible that the data contains trailing
: blanks, due to it coming from an Oracle system, but I still think that
: Mr. Oracle should be smart enough to know what to do. Thanx for any
: advice.
 

: ----- Mike Winters Peace Corps (202)606-5543

I'm not sure there is something wrong with Oracle, but anyway... There is (was?) a crt definition called IBM3270U which inserts trailing underscores in the fields but doesn't write these underscores to the database. So check out if your default.crt file contains something you won't (look for the escape string for terminal reset and the various attr fields).
Check out with your system operator, how your OS will deal with trailing blank, f. e. in XEDIT there is an option "SET NULLS ON" which will insert nulls (X'00) as trailing blanks in XEDIT and not X'40. So check this also (If you set nulls off, you can't insert characters in xedit unless you delete them). (I'm not sure, but long, long time ago I also couldn't insert more characters in a field unless I zeroed the trailing blanks but then I think this was a problem of the terminal I worked on)

Hope this helps
LM

--
Leo Mannhart
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