Designing the Procedure Logic › Advanced Action Diagram Features › Action Diagram Functions › Function Example

Function Example

Assume that an employee's name is stored as three separate attributes: First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name. The following actions set the value of EMPLOYEE Full Name to Last Name followed by a comma and a space, First Name followed by a space, and the first character of Middle Name followed by a period.

SET employee full_name TO CONCAT(TRIM(employee last_name),

CONCAT(', ',employee first_name))

SET employee full_name TO CONCAT(TRIM(employee full_name),

CONCAT(' ',CONCAT(SUBSTR(employee middle_name,1,1 ),'.')))

• CONCAT is an action diagram function that combines two character strings.
• TRIM is an action diagram function that removes trailing blanks from a character string.
• SUBSTR is an action diagram function that extracts a portion from a character string. It requires a starting position within the string and the length of the string to extract.

If the values of EMPLOYEE First Name, Middle Name and Last Name are Charles, Taze, and Russell, respectively, the value of EMPLOYEE Full Name after the execution of the example statements would be Russell, Charles T.