Advanced Topics

Validation against CA-DATADICTIONARY

The interface view engine always reads in the CA-DATADICTIONARY information when it processes a view descriptor, because CA-DATADICTIONARY contains information that is not in the view descriptor, for example, the element entity.

Consider the following matters regarding CA-DATADICTIONARY usage by the interface view engine:

Elements are groupings of fields. They are used to read and update the tables. The interface view engine makes a "best-fit" list of elements to use when it executes the view descriptor. If the database administrator fine-tunes the element definitions to improve performance, the interface view engine can take advantage of the improvements.

The interface view engine rejects a view descriptor if certain information that is stored in the view descriptor does not match the dictionary. Specifically, you cannot change the following information:

entity-occurrence names and types for these entities: DATABASE, FILE, RECORD, KEY, FIELD
field class, from simple to compound or vice versa

field data types, from one category to another. The categories are as follows:

	numeric: types B (binary), 2 (halfword), 4 (fullword), 8 (double), N(Zoned), D (packed decimal)
	float: types L (long float), S (short float)
	alpha: types C (char), H (hex)
	Xtype: types B > 8 bytes, D and N > 16 bytes, E (extended float), G (graphics), K (kanji), T (PL/1 bit), Y (double byte character set), Z (mixed DBCS and single byte)

Note: Xtype is an artificial type. It represents a CA-Datacom/DB type that cannot be fully handled in SAS. [cautionend]

You should set up a CA-DATADICTIONARY user ID and password for SAS and not change them. The user ID should have retrieval authority in CA-DATADICTIONARY for six entity-types: DATABASE, FILE, RECORD, ELEMENT, KEY, and FIELD. The user ID and password do not protect data, but the interface view engine needs them to obtain information from CA-DATADICTIONARY. If you change the user ID or password, then the view descriptors must be recreated, or you must use the data set options to override the user ID and password. (You can also zap these values in the CSECT DDBAUSE option, which is used by the ACCESS procedure.)

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