I'm curious about some of the documented limitations.

Index limits are defined as follows

Maximum number of fields = 32 with no combined fields.
Maximum number of index parts = 8

What is the difference between these two? I have encountered the second limit but I don't understand the first limit.

Also, under reports, there is a maximum of 253 fields on a report. Is anyone aware of this changing? I am up against the wall on this limit. Every time someone asks me to add a variable to our invoice layout, I have to find a variable to take away. Eventually I'm going to run out of options.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

(1) Index parts I think has to do with the actual index domains. So for example if you have 3 string fields this is only 1 index part. If you has string, interger, string then that is 3 parts. I actually had to play with 1 index to get the fields that I wanted and get past this 8 parts.

(2) One way I got through this once was to combine string fields - example in the script I created rpt.field1. Then I set this to tiitm001.item & tiitm001.dsca. I think if you wanted you could then separate them in the report script, but the ones I picked to do this with I just printed.

Just my thoughts.

Hi there,

absolutely not sure about index limitations .... but perhaps the 32 refers to absolute number of fields once you convert the combined fields to actual components .. that would make it possible to have 8 combined fields when all combined fields consist of 4 'real' fields ??? (Just a guess though)

Thanks for the hint concerning field limitations .... didn't know that either.
Did you ever consider to write a filter in awk or perl that will explode strings that you have glued together in the report-script?

regards

Norbert