Putlistitems - successive occurrences

I've used putlistitems a lot, it's very useful.  Different switches all it to do different things, so for example, /occ will populate a variable with an associative list of field names and values, something like this...

  putlistitems/occ varMyList,"ENT"

"varMyList" will now be something like "FIELD1=VALUE1·;FIELD2=VALUE2·;etc".

This can further be modified by adding /modonly, which will only add field values to the list which have been modified since the record was retrieved, something like this...

  putlistitems/occ/modonly varMyList,"ENT"

However, the one I tend to use most is /id.  This will take the values of the specified field from multiple occurrences and put them into a list, something like this...

  varMyList = "FIELD1"

  putlistitems/id varMyList

"varMyList" will now be something like "VALUE1·;VALUE1·;etc", repeated for each occurrence.

This allows you to quickly grab the values of the field(s) you're interested in, without having to loop through the occurrences in order to build the list, which is much better for performance.

Or you can also use it to update the representations in a list, for example, backing up a load of field or register values...

  varMyList = "$1·;$2·;$3"

  putlistitems/id varMyList

"varMyList" will now be something like "$1=REG1·;$2=REG2·;$3=REG3".

All of this is well documented in the Uniface manuals, so you may well be asking me why I'm telling you this.  Fair question.

I never realised that the first use of /id, taking the values of the specified field from multiple occurrences, was actually successive occurrence.  This means that it will start on the current occurrence and loop through to the end, completing the hitlist if required.

The manuals make this clear, with the following note...

To ensure that the entire set of occurrences in the component is being addressed, make the first occurrence the current occurrence.

What this means is, use setocc first, like this..

  setocc "ENT",1

  varMyList = "FIELD1"

  putlistitems/id varMyList

I hope I've not been caught out by this in the past!

Summary: putlistitems/id will look at successive occurrences, so if you want the whole hitlist, remember to make sure the current occurrence is the first occurrence.

Indirection with dollar registers

Indirection in Uniface is a wonderful thing.  You can populate a local/component/global variable with a field name, and then use indirection to get the field value of the field that the variable references.  You can also use it to set the referenced field to a value, like this...

  fld1 = "fld2"

  @fld1 = "Test"

  if ( fld2 = "Test" )

    ;this will be true

  endif

In this example, using the "@" character to indicate indirection, it's the field which is referenced by "fld1" and not "fld1" itself which is updated.

You can even do recursive indirection, which is very cool!  Not something I've had a need for myself, but very clever all the same.

However, today I was trying to populate a register the same way, using code something like this...

  reg50 = "$50"

  @reg50 = "Test"

  if ( $50 = "Test" )

    ;this will be false!

  endif

In this example, the register was still blank (or whatever the register was before hitting this code).

To be fair, this is clearly stated in the Uniface manuals...

Only fields can be referenced indirectly; the name reached by the indirect reference cannot be a variable. The following example is incorrect because the indirection refers to a general variable rather than to a field:

$1 = "$99"

@$1 = "This string does not go to $99."

But I still wanted to be able to set registers in an indirect way, so I came up with this alternative...

  putitem/id list,"$50","Test"

  getlistitems/id list

  if ( $50 = "Test" )

    ;this will be true

  endif

This works by populating a list with the register and the value, and then uses getlistitems to populate them.  The "/id" mode copies items from the associative list into one or more fields, or registers in this case.

For example, you could use a simple for loop to clear out all of the dollar registers...

  for count = 1 to 99

    putitem/id list,"$%%count%%%",""

  endfor

  getlistitems/id list

This would set each of the 99 dollar registers to blank.

Summary: Indirection works great for fields, but not for registers - however, you can use getlistitems to achieve the same outcome.

Types of for loops - part one

I have already discussed the basic for loop in my last post, but in Uniface 9.5 there were a number of other list constructs made available, which I plan to investigate over the next few posts, having never used them before.  


I wrote a post a couple of months ago entitled Performance of list processing, which looked at different ways of looping through a Uniface list of values.  In this post I determined that one of the quickest ways was a while loop with a counter, using getitem to extract each value in turn, something like this...


  count = 0

  $status = 1

  while ( $status > 0 )

    count = count+1

    getitem temp,list,count

    ;do something

  endwhile

However, one of the new constructs is forlist, which can be used to the same affect...

  forlist temp,count in list

    ;do something

  endfor

As you can see, the code is much more concise.  There is no need to initialise the count variable or  $status, everything is done as part of the forlist statement, and the incrementing and extracting are done automatically.  The "count" variable is optional, if you don't need it then you don't need to include it.

It is also possible to do the same thing when you have an ID list, where the same construct will return both the ID and the value of each item in the list separately...


  forlist/id id,temp,count in list

    ;do something

  endfor

The "count" variable is also optional in this case.  You know what's coming next...

So let's test these three blocks of code over 2,000,000 iterations...

• while = 01:18.47, 01:17.55, 01:18.11 (around 1 minute 18 seconds)
• forlist = 01:08.06, 01:08.51, 01:08.42 (just over 1 minute 8 seconds)
• forlist/id = 01:17.27, 01:18.03, 01:17.26 (just over 1 minute 17 seconds)

As you can see, forlist is not only more concise from a coding perspective, but it also performs better.  Given the number of iterations, the performance gain would probably be limited, but it is clearly the better option.

Summary: Whilst I have previously always used while loops, I shall now be considering switching the forlist loops, for iterating through a list.