Coding conventions

The table ROW-AREA and the tableBASE COMMAND-AREA are generated at the 01 level. Individual fields within these areas are generated as 05 levels.

Generated field names are prefixed by the tableBASE View name, unless the field prefix parameter is used. Embedded blanks are replaced by hyphens to ensure that the generated field names are valid COBOL words. The tableBASE Data Table name is placed in positions 73-80 of each line generated.

DATE fields are divided into subfields (year, month, day). These subfields are defined at level 10; a suffix is appended to each subfield to uniquely identify it. For example, an A format DATE field (YYYMMDD) is redefined with three level-10 fields suffixed with: -YY, -MM and -DD.

If the DATE field name is longer than 16 characters, it is truncated to 16 characters to accommodate the suffixes in the generated level-10 subfields. (COBOL field names are limited to 30 characters in length.)