Is there any way to get WF to store varchar (say, A4000V) compactly?

I know the internal structure of xfocus pages is capable of holding segment instances of varying length.

But (judging from statistics shown by ? FDT AND ? FILE) MODIFY always creates a segment instance of uniform size, i.e. allowing for the longest possible content in the variable-length character fields, even when short character-string values are specified in FREEFORM input.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Basic answer is no.

quote:

In a FOCUS or XFOCUS data source, AnV does not provide true variable length character support. It is a fixed-length character field with two extra leading bytes to contain the actual length of the data stored in the field. This length is stored as a short integer value occupying two bytes. Trailing blanks entered as part of an AnV field count in its length.

Thanks. Somewhat odd that IBI did not supply "true support" in XFOCUS, considering its IDMS-like internal page structure.