[Download-List] Field being truncated to 126 chars in DOWNLOAD

[David L. Rotman]

Brian--

I believe the problem relates to how DOWNLOAD does the EVAL.

DOWNLOAD does not write items to any file dictionary or to the VOC file to do an EVAL.  Rather, the EVAL is accomplished via an EXECUTE...CAPTURING statement.  The actual calculated value is fetched using a SAVING clause.  Unfortunately, it appears that this method limits EVAL output to the system value U_NAMESZ (126 characters on my system).  I have not found any method for changing the value of U_NAMESZ.

To this point, it appears that U2 products do not provide any direct method for calling the EVAL logic.  Programs that I have encountered have taken two approaches to working around this limitation:
* Creating a temporary dictionary record (approach taken by XLIST)
* Using a LIST statement and capturing the output (approach taken by DOWNLOAD).

At a minimum, I will need to update the documentation to identify this limitation on EVAL.

I would be interested in hearing from other users about the approach to use for a better resolution.  I have been hesitant to provide software that writes to files on the local system (other than files specified by the FILE phrase), especially when it is not obvious that a file write is generated by a particular use of DOWNLOAD.  Am I being overly cautious about not writing to files?  Would it be acceptable to make the operation of EVAL a compile-time choice?

 
 

Dave Rotman
Associate Vice President for Technology
Chief Information Officer
Cedarville University
251 N. Main Street
Cedarville, OH 45314
rotmand at cedarville.edu 
voice 937-766-7905
fax 937-766-8819



>>> Brian McGuire <bmcguire at gcu.edu> 9/25/2009 10:18 AM >>>
Ok now I do have a DOWNLOAD issue.  I have a field that is being truncated to 126 characters by DOWNLOAD.  I have my test paragraph below.  I have also tried adding LENGTH 500 as a qualifier to the field and the output for that field is always truncated to 126 characters.  Does anyone know how to remove the truncation or expand it to ~500 characters?

Thanks.

PA
SELECT COURSES SAMPLE 100
*
DOWNLOAD COURSES \
   ID.SUP \
   EVAL "CONVERT(@VM,' ',CRS.DESC)"    COL.HDG 'Comments' \
   COMMA.CHAR "|" \
   QUOTE.CHAR '' \
   NO.PAGE NO.DISPLAY.COUNT \
   FILE _HOLD_ BRM-TEST.txt OVERWRITING


If I use XLIST with DOWNLOAD as below, the entire field displays.  So this time I believe the issue is with DOWNLOAD.

PA
SELECT COURSES SAMPLE 100
*
XLIST COURSES DL \
   ID.SUP \
   EVAL "CONVERT(@VM,' ',CRS.DESC)" \
       COL.HDG 'Comments' \
   COMMA.CHAR "|" \
   QUOTE.CHAR '' \
   NO.PAGE NO.DISPLAY.COUNT \
   FILE _HOLD_ BRM-TEST.txt OVERWRITING


Brian McGuire, Ph.D., MAS
Executive Director
______________________________
Office of Institutional Research & Student Systems
Direct:      602-639-6551
bmcguire at gcu.edu<mailto:bmcguire at gcu.edu>