HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Phase 1--Application Planning
The first task in application planning is to define the requirements of
your application. As part of this task, you need to identify the field
specifications, record layouts, and data files the application needs.
For this training guide, that step has been done for you. The type of
data required for each field has been defined, and the number of menu and
data screens has been determined.
Some Rules of Thumb for HP ALLBASE/4GL Names
Although the names for the training application have already been
selected, you should be aware of the following general rules regarding
names used in HP ALLBASE/4GL applicatons.
Naming Rules.
* All names must start with an alphabetic character. Names can
contain any combination of alphabetic characters, 0 to 9, and _
(underscore). Components of KSAM based and HP TurboIMAGE/iX based
applications may also include extended (eight-bit) characters.
* The names that you use must be unique for each type of item that
you are creating. However, you can use one name for a number of
different types of items. For example, you can have a report, a
screen, a field and a process all called order. However, you
cannot have two reports with the name order.
* You can use up to eight characters for:
* modules built by the module builder,
* file names or SQL tables names, and
* SQL select list names.
* You can use up to 16 characters to name all other application
items.
Case Sensitivity.
HP ALLBASE/4GL names are case sensitive, so you must always type the name
of an item the same way each time that you use it. For example, the
variable V-item_cost is not the same as the variable V-ITEM_COST.
HP ALLBASE/SQL and HP TurboIMAGE/iX, on the other hand, are not case
sensitive; they automatically shift some HP ALLBASE/4GL names to
uppercase.
This means that you must make sure that the record layout does not
contain two field specifications that have the same name when they are
shifted to uppercase. The field specification names Account_No and
account_no are distinct in HP ALLBASE/4GL, but are duplicates in HP
ALLBASE/SQL or HP TurboIMAGE/iX databases.
HP ALLBASE/4GL displays a warning if you attempt to define a table or
data set name, and the same name already exists in uppercase format.