numeric value is out-of-range

[Antonio Wiesner]

My mistake that I set a numeric field with a 4 digit width, and when calculated, its value will be say, 7 digit wide. In Alpha5 V4.5 this will cause an update operation to abort and a "numeric value is out-of-range" message will appear (only if update runs non-silent). The problem is that when included in an Action Script, this saved update is skipped and no calculation is carried out at all. I wonder if there is a way, such as an error trap, that warns the programmer that something is wrong with the table structure, and so prevent that calculations are simply omitted as is the case in my Script.

Naturally I corrected the faulty width.

In fact, this case of skipped operations without warning happens too often in Alpha5. Another annoying behavior is that when an operation is deleted for some reason, in any script where it was included Alpha5 inserts the first A to Z operation it finds, which is terribly misleading.

Antonio Wiesner

[Michael Humby]

RE: numeric value is out-of-range

Antonio

The only way I know is to perform the update using Xbasic. This will throw up the error.

If you are not happy writing an xbasic update operation then let Alpha do it for:
1. Open the saved update
2. Before running the update open the script recorder and click the recording check box.
3. You will then be able to copy the script and save it for your own use. You could also write an error trap message.

Michael

[Antonio Wiesner]

RE: numeric value is out-of-range

Thanks for your note. I have tried what you suggest and in fact the Xbasic update aborts and the message is error 1069 which correctly indicates out-of-range. So I see that saved operation errors are really not trapped, as such update is not carried out but Alpha5 continues with the script, the missing calculations go unnoticed and the user goes on with wrong data.

Of course, special care must be taken in configuring tables to prevent that any possible future value of a field will be larger than fits in the field width. To me this is not a friendly feature of Alpha Five, and my objection is that when erroneous data are on the way due to flawed code, the software should warn the programmer.

Antonio Wiesner