This is the number of character positions required to display the field on the screen.
Many times a field's display length will be the same as that of the attribute it implements, but in some cases it will not. The most frequent reason for a difference in display length and attribute length is the use of an edit pattern.
For example, consider an attribute of Employee called Date Hired that contains a 4-digit year, a 2-digit month and a 2-digit day, 8 digits in all. When placing a field representing Date Hired on a screen, you determine that it should be displayed in the format YYYY-MM-DD. The insertion of two additional characters (the dashes) requires a display length of 10 characters. So, the attribute length is 8 while the display length is 10.
In some cases, you may choose to truncate a field value to make it fit on a screen. For instance, an 80-character description may not fit on a densely packed screen. You can squeeze it in by reducing the display length. Avoid this approach wherever possible because of the potential loss of meaning resulting from the partial display.
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