I am new to the Focus world. I am looking through someones FEX and see the following statement:

MODIFY FILE INTKELOG
FIXFORM FROM HOLDLOG
MATCH IND_CLAIMNO
ON MATCH CONTINUE
ON NOMATCH INCLUDE
MATCH PRO_STATUS PRO_DATE PRO_TIME
On MATCH CONTINUE
ON MATCH INCLUDE
DATA ON HOLDLOG

Can someone explain to me what this means?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Emily McAllister>,

You have a multi-segment file, probably a FOCUS file named INTKELOG. HOLDLOG is a transaction file. It is being read to add new records to a child segment in INTKELOG.

IND_CLAIMNO is the primary key to the top segment. The child segment being updated has a key using PRO_STATUS, PRO_DATE & PRO_TIME.

MODIFY is similar to an SQL UPDATE.

Also there are MODIFY manuals, but you will need to search the Doc Library to find them.

Your code is updating a table called INTKELOG. Take a look at SUFFIX= in INTKELOG.MAS and find out what type of data it is. For instance SUFFIX=FOCUS means you're updating a FOCUS internal data; SUFFIX=SQLORA means INTKELOG is an Oracle table.

FIXFORM FROM means the columns in the code are defined by a master file called HOLDLOG.MAS. So you can look at HOLDLOG.MAS to find out the format of IND_CLAIMNO and PRO_STATUS, et cetera. MATCH means find the first occurance of the falue for IND_CLAIMNO and when you find a MATCH do x and when you do not find a MATCH do the other. Specifically, ON MATCH CONTINUE means go to the next MATCH and ON NOMATCH INCLUDE means if this value doesn't exist INSERT it into the database being updated.

DATA ON HOLDLOG means look for the data you're trying to insert or update in a dataset (usually text file) in a table called HOLDLOG.FTM.

My guess is that before this code is executed, a hold file is being created by a TABLE FILE request that creates an answer set using ON TABLE HOLD AS HOLDLOG.