Field Types

TAS Professional has a very rich group of field types. These types give you much flexibility and power. Since you can call external programs and pass values to them, some of these types, especially the p-pointer (type P), are even more important. See Internal Specifications for more information about what these fields look like in the program. (All sizes are in bytes/characters.)

TAS Professional Field Types

Type	Name	Internal Size	Display	Dec	Acceptable characters
A	Alpha	1-4gb	1-4gb	N/A	All displayable chrs
N	Numeric	8	1-20	0-9	+,- and . (local decimal char)
B	Byte	1	1-3	N/A	0-9
L	Logical	1	3	N/A	.True., .Y., .False., .N.
I	Integer	2	1-5	N/A	0-9
R	Record	4	1-10	N/A	0-9
D	Date	4	5,7,8,10	N/A
T	Time	4	5,7,8,10,11,13	N/A
F	F-Pointer	5	7	N/A	no entry allowed (internal pointer)
P	P-Pointer	14	26	N/A	no entry allowed (standard flat pointer)
V	Overlay	1-4gb	1-4gb	N/A	N/A
U	Unique Auto Increment	4	10	N/A	No entry Allowed

NOTE: Internally, V type fields are treated like A type fields. This was the standard way of creating compound indexes in previous versions of TAS Professional. However, in TAS Professional this is not necessary and should no longer be used. VERY IMPORTANT: If you are accessing CodeBase type files (Type C) this will no longer work and will probably give you an error at best. You should use the standard multi-segment index approach that is now a part of Maintain Data Dictionary.

NOTE: Even though the maximum size of an A or V type field is 4gb (4,294,967,295 bytes ) the maximum size of any record in a Btrieve file is 64k (65,535 bytes).

NOTE: Integer type B (Byte) field have only positive values.

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