What is the character limit in variables?

Hi,

Just a quick question. I suppose I could look this up but it would be
much quicker to get the answer from the distinguished company here
assembled. I've been working with importing records from an Oracle
database via ODBC in FMP6. FWIW, it works surprisingly well. The queries
are large and the various "pieces" of the queries (I concatenate the
pieces with FMP fields to form the total query) are stored in global
fields. I had to do this because the query text pieces sometimes exceed
the character limits for static text in a calculation field.

Ultimately, I'll be moving this solution to FMP9. I've never used
variables before (this is something I will have to learn) but at the
moment I was just curious as to whether I can use variables to store or
manipulate the query pieces rather than storing them in global fields.
Or perhaps the character limit in calculation fields has increased in
FMP9?

Thanks,

Bill

Re: What is the character limit in variables?

On 2007-09-13 09:55:36 -0700, William Maslin said:

> Hi,
>
> Just a quick question. I suppose I could look this up but it would be
> much quicker to get the answer from the distinguished company here
> assembled. I've been working with importing records from an Oracle
> database via ODBC in FMP6. FWIW, it works surprisingly well. The queries
> are large and the various "pieces" of the queries (I concatenate the
> pieces with FMP fields to form the total query) are stored in global
> fields. I had to do this because the query text pieces sometimes exceed
> the character limits for static text in a calculation field.
>
> Ultimately, I'll be moving this solution to FMP9. I've never used
> variables before (this is something I will have to learn) but at the
> moment I was just curious as to whether I can use variables to store or
> manipulate the query pieces rather than storing them in global fields.
> Or perhaps the character limit in calculation fields has increased in
> FMP9?

There is no more "Character limit" as such in text fields in FM7+. The
size limit is 2Gigabytes per field, however many characters that works
out to. A metric sh**load. Results in calc fields the same. In the
calc dialog, I am not aware of character limits, though there may be
some lingering limit to nested Ifs, which no one should be using anyway.

Variables are at least 2G per, and may be unlimited based on available
RAM (very large, in other words). You can, if you wish, create
repeating variables, and address repeats individually. If you enter
data in Repeat 1, and other data in Repeat 1million, the intervening
empty repeats do not consume any memory. Each repeat, whether in a
field or a variable, can contain up to the limit of 2G.

One thing to be aware of is that all variables are of type text.
Anything you put into them is going to be converted, and you cannot use
them for container input. For various limited purposes they will behave
properly when extracting data, as if they were of type number or date,
but if you put mixed data types IN, and then try to extract it, you may
have to use various GetAs typing functions to extract it in the proper
form.

--
Lynn Allen
--
www.semiotics.com
Member Filemaker Business Alliance
Long Beach, CA

Re: What is the character limit in variables?

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

Re: What is the character limit in variables?

On 2007-09-13 10:36:43 -0700, Martin Trautmann said:

>> Variables are at least 2G per, and may be unlimited based on available
>> RAM (very large, in other words).
>
> This is true even for the name of the variable itself?

Martin, if you're naming your variables with 2G worth of name, you've
got problems I can't help you with. ;)

Like the guy who kept asking if there was any limit to the numbers of
fields or layouts...well, no, but practically speaking once you get
above 1000 or so, managing them becomes unfeasible.
--
Lynn Allen
--
www.semiotics.com
Member Filemaker Business Alliance
Long Beach, CA