It's easy to assign the value of a variable to a field. But what about the reverse?

How do you assign the value of a field to a variable without having to do a -READ? If you have a data file and mfd, is there a way to read the file with a table request and then take the value of a field and put it into a variable?

Thank you,

John

John,

Can this do the trick?

  
-* File johnb6.fex
-SET &ECHO=ALL;
FILEDEF JFEX DISK JFEX.FEX
SET HOLDLIST=PRINTONLY
TABLE FILE CAR
PRINT 
COMPUTE I/I1=1 + LAST I; NOPRINT
COMPUTE SET1/A30='-SET &|V' | EDIT(I,'9=''') | COUNTRY || ''';';
ON TABLE SAVE AS JFEX
END 
-RUN
-INCLUDE JFEX

A simpler variation would be:

TABLE FILE CAR
PRINT COUNTRY
IF RECORDLIMIT EQ 1
ON TABLE SAVE
END
-RUN
-READ SAVE &COUNTRY.A10.

There are lots of variations on this. You could read all the cars and save &LINES and use it as a loop counter to read all the countries in the SAVE files.

There should be lots of examples of this in forum posts. Try searching on SAVE or AMPER VARIABLE.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Ginny,

John said:

quote:

How do you assign the value of a field to a variable without having to do a -READ?

...

Sorry I missed that. I was up very late watching Olympics. Doesn't bode well for the rest of the day, does it?

Daniel - Seems like that is the very long way around just to avoid a -READ, but it DOES answer the question.

Either way, it's going to take two steps. There isn't a way to do it in a single steps. So

1)create -SETs, hold, and then -INCLUDE (creates multiple variables)
or
2)hold and then -READ (creates multiple values to use with a single variable)

Darin,

Yes. It seems a bit of a roundabout way. Nonetheless, it would depend on what you want to achieve. If, for instance you do want multiple variables, I would say that, not having a loop would make the -INCLUDE more efficient.
In any case it is good to know that WF allows for interesting program generation by creating DM commands in a file and then including them, dynamically.