FIELD Command

Page numbering can be accomplished by specifying FIELD with the PAGENUM parameter. Most often, you specify FIELD PAGENUM with other formatting information such as position and alignment, which causes the current page number to print at the specified position. The current page number is calculated based on the specification of the PAGECOUNT parameter on the previous PAGEDEF or PAGEFORMAT command. You can override the page number to a specific value using the RESET parameter on the FIELD command. For details, see Page Numbering.

You can retrieve the value of the Record ID for printing using the RECID keyword on FIELD. RECID also has START and LENGTH subparameters to allow only portions of the Record ID to be printed. Normally, you only use the RECID parameter for debugging your application by tracing which Record IDs are being processed, although it can be used for anything that makes sense for your application.

You can also specify the POSITION, COLOR, DIRECTION, and ALIGN keywords with the PAGENUM or RECID parameters on FIELD. The BARCODE and SUPPRESSION keywords are not allowed with PAGENUM or RECID, but can be used with other text fields from the Data Record.

ALIGN is a keyword that is allowed with the START/LENGTH or TEXT forms of the FIELD command, but only if you are doing record formatting. ALIGN lets you specify whether the field text should be LEFT or RIGHT aligned at the given horizontal position.

If your Data Records are stored in a database, the fields may be separated with field delimiters instead of just being positional within the record. The DELIMITER keyword on the preceding LAYOUT command is used to specify the one- or two-byte value that is used to separate fields in the Data Records.

If your data uses field delimiters, you can also specify the FLDNUM parameter on the FIELD command to indicate the number of the field within the record to be extracted, rather than the START position. Fields are numbered from left to right beginning with 1. You can also use the starting position (START) and LENGTH keywords with the FLDNUM to indicate that only part of the field is to be formatted. An example of a typical command is:

  ⋮
 LAYOUT 'abc' DELIMITER '*';
  FIELD  FLDNUM 1  START 2  LENGTH 8   ALIGN RIGHT
    POSITION  5.6 in  CURRENT
    FONT varb ; /* Variable text - Amount  */
  FIELD  FLDNUM 2  ALIGN LEFT
    POSITION  1.1 in  .9 in
    FONT varb ; /*variable - customer name */

 abc       *Here is some data*more data*

 1st field  'ere is s'
 2nd field  'more data'