Changing attribute lengths

We recently decided to increase the length of a database column (attribute) to support longer path lengths. In principle this is a very easy task:

a) Change the attribute length
b) Amend the column length in the database design
c) Use database ALTER statements to change the physical database column length
d) Re-generate the affected code

In practice however, two aspects of the change were trickier:

1) Where the attribute is referenced in external action blocks, these will need to be identified and modified.
2) Code that is dependant on the attribute length might need to be modified.

The first issue was easy to solve. We created a custom function in Object List+ that lists all external action blocks that reference the attribute in an import or export view. The resulting list was then copied to a GuardIEn Change Request and then opened in XOS. All of the affected externals could then be downloaded and modified.

The second issue was harder. We had some code that assumed the old length of the attribute (in this case 50), for example, SET text = SUBSTR(attribute,49,2) was supposed to return the last two characters of the attribute. Now I agree that this is not great code, and the attribute length could be referenced using the length function rather than 50, but it was assumed that the length would not change and the hard-coded value used instead of the length to improve performance.

To identify these occurrences, a new VerifIEr check was developed that scans for code that uses the length of an attribute as a hard-coded value. This was able to identify code that needed to be changed and can also identify any future occurrences of this style of coding that would not be tolerant of a change in attribute length.

This illustrates one of the strengths of CA Gen. Because the action diagram 'source code' is stored in a SQL database using a precise structure (as opposed to the text files used by almost any other development tool), it supports complex queries that can scan the action diagrams looking for specific coding constructs.