Continuing from part five where we looked at "7", "8" and "9"...
10 - Directory listing (files)
This sets $result to be a Uniface list of all the files in the specified directory. It also sets $status to be the count of files returned, like this...
interrupt(10,"C:\temp")
list = $result
count = $status
In my test case it sets $result to be "test.txt·;test2.txt" and $status to be 2. At last, there's a nice Uniface function to replace this one; $ldirlist or $dirlist can be used. These actually return folders and files by default, but you can specify the "FILE" topic to limit it. Both of these methods allow you to use wildcards. The functions do not return the number of files found, but as they do return the list, we can easily use $itemcount if you want this as well, like this...
list = $ldirlist("C:\temp","FILE")
count = $itemcount(list)
This is much cleaner code, very concise and readable. So how does it perform, I hear you cry! I tested over 200,000 iterations...
- interrupt = 00:17.10, 00:16.89, 00:16.96 (around 17 seconds)
- $ldirlist = 00:14.68, 00:14.72, 00:14.67 (almost 15 seconds)
So there's not a lot in it, but it does performs better. I think the alternative is definitely the way to go in this case.
11 - Directory listing (folders)
This sets $result to be a Uniface list of all the folders in the specified directory, similar to "10". It also sets $status to be the count of folders returned, like this...
interrupt(11,"C:\temp")
This sets $result to be a Uniface list of all the folders in the specified directory, similar to "10". It also sets $status to be the count of folders returned, like this...
interrupt(11,"C:\temp")
list = $result
count = $status
In my test case it sets $result to be "test·;test2" and $status to be 2. Similarly $ldirlist or $dirlist can be used, but specifying the "DIR" topic this time, like this...
list = $ldirlist("C:\temp","DIR")
count = $itemcount(list)
Let's test the performance over 200,000 iterations again...
- interrupt = 00:15.31, 00:15.30, 00:15.24 (over 15 seconds)
- $ldirlist = 00:13.33, 00:13.37, 00:13.45 (over 13 seconds)
Again there's not a lot in it, but it does performs better. I think the alternative is definitely the way to go in this case as well.
More unknowns
Having no indication of what they did, I ran some basic tests on the codes "12" to "988" (see the next post for why I stopped there). Mostly it was pretty uninteresting, generally speaking they set $status to -1 and leave $result unaffected. There were some that left $status unaffected as well, and most interestingly "18" sets $result to a blank string. Unfortunately I couldn't work out anything more for any of them, but I'd like to investigate this further.
Summary: Numeric codes "10" and "11" are useful but have been replaced by $ldirlist and $dirlist which do the same thing, but better. All the codes beyond that, seem to be useless. Except "989" which we will tackle in the next post.
Having no indication of what they did, I ran some basic tests on the codes "12" to "988" (see the next post for why I stopped there). Mostly it was pretty uninteresting, generally speaking they set $status to -1 and leave $result unaffected. There were some that left $status unaffected as well, and most interestingly "18" sets $result to a blank string. Unfortunately I couldn't work out anything more for any of them, but I'd like to investigate this further.
Summary: Numeric codes "10" and "11" are useful but have been replaced by $ldirlist and $dirlist which do the same thing, but better. All the codes beyond that, seem to be useless. Except "989" which we will tackle in the next post.
