Designing Interactive Panels (Panel Services) › Control the Formatting of Input Fields › Allow Long Field Names in Short Fields

Allow Long Field Names in Short Fields

Panel Services panel definition screens look similar to the panel which is to be displayed. The panel definition screen contains attribute characters followed by the field data (for TYPE=OUTPUT fields) or variable names (for TYPE=INPUT or TYPE=OUTVAR fields). The next field attribute character is placed at the start position of the next field. Unfortunately this means that input fields cannot be any shorter than the variable name which is to contain the input data.

To overcome this, you can use the #ALIAS control statement to define a short alias name for a variable. The alias name can be used where the variable would have been used. You can define a range or list of variables and refer to them by the same alias name in the panel definition.