I saw that OI handles international character maps. We have a foriegn customer who cannot have $ in front of money amounts. I have not had a reason to work with the international character maps yet. Could we use this to remap $ to a space or null or some other character? All suggestions welcome.

Jeff,

I assume you're asking this because you don't want to change MD2,$ conversions to MD2, throughout the application, right?

Correct. And because we do not want it to be just one way or just the other but rather have the option of either way.

Jeff,

The mapping MIGHT work. I never used it though, so I cannot give you an oppinion on that. It would be sweet if it did, but I somehow doubt it.

However, if that does not work, I would write a conversion subroutine, lets call it MONEY.

Inside the subroutine, I would always check an @property on a window that's always open. That @property will be filled in when the application gets started and would contain the currency symbol that you want ( or a space) .

Inside the MONEY subroutine, you can then do :

 MONEY_AMOUNT=OCONV( INTERNAL_FORMAT_MONEY_AMOUNT , "MD2,":currency_symbol)

Obviously, with this you would do a system-wide search and replace of conversion MD2,$ to MONEY (not fun). The dictionaries should be easy to change programatically, but any form that has fields that specify MD2,$ would need to be recompiled after you change the window's source code in SYSREPOSWIN. If you really know what you're doing you could also change SYSREPOSWINEXES directly, and no recompilation would be needed.

I hope my rambling message makes sense

Dave

Dave,

That is definitely the way to go. I always use user-defined (aka square bracket) conversions for:

1) Dates

2) Times

3) Date/Times

4) Money

5) All application primary keys

The last one is really handy - for example, purchase order numbers, account numbers, stock numbers, employee id's, vendor numbers, work order numbers, whatever they are, have an input validation/conversion and output conversion for them!

Additionally, it gives you a place to collect other functionality including:

1) Error messages for improperly entered information

2) Lookups (I named it the "OPT" branch)

3) Exists verification (like a veri-file)

4) Description lookup (when you want to display a symbolic description of the key)

It really simplifies rote work and makes the application much more easily customizable.

Cameron Purdy

Revelation Software

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