Command Facility Considerations › Statement Coding Considerations

Statement Coding Considerations

Statement components

Utility statements consist of:

• Keywords that:
  • Identify the action requested by the statement (for example, BACKUP or PRINT SPACE)
  • Specify the type of entity (for example, AREA or SEGMENT) that is the object of the requested action
  • Place qualifications on the requested action, either by themselves (for example, SHARE or NO REPORT) or in conjunction with user-supplied values (for example, START AT 1999-12-08-06.00.00)
• User-supplied values that:
  • Identify specific occurrences of entities (for example, the area EMP_SPACE or the database segment DEMOSEG)
  • Specify data values (for example, 983 or 'Boston')
• Separators that separate keywords and user-supplied values from one another. A separator can be a space, a comment, or the end of a line.

Separators are not required:

• Before or after a value in single quotation marks
• A comma (,)
• An equal sign (=)
• Left and right parentheses ()
• A period (.)
• A semicolon (;)

Delimiting statements

When you use the command facility to submit utility statements, you must terminate each statement with a statement delimiter, which by default is a semicolon (;). You can enter the delimiter either on the same line as the rest of the statement or on a separate line. For example, the two statements shown next are equivalent:

format area emp-region-area;

format area emp-region-area;

Continuing statements

You can code utility statements on one or more lines. No special character is required to indicate that a statement continues on the next line.

Quotation marks around identifiers

In a utility statement, you must enclose a database entity identifier in double quotation marks if the identifier includes significant lowercase characters, special characters (except a dash (-)), or blanks. Place the quotation marks only around the individual identifier for which they are required (for example, SALESSEG."EST%_SPACE").

Note that all identifiers can contain dashes even when not quoted. For example, SALES-SEG."EST%_SPACE".

More Information

• For more information about the use of quotation marks with identifiers, see the CA IDMS SQL Reference Guide.
• For more information about database entity identifiers, see the CA IDMS Database Administration Guide.

Maximum statement length

A utility statement can be at most 8,192 bytes long. If you are using only single-byte characters, the maximum number of characters equals the maximum number of bytes. If any user-supplied values contain double-byte characters, the maximum number of characters is less than the maximum number of bytes.