Binding program arrays to screen arrays
In order to display a browsable list of records, the program arrays must be
associated to a screen array in the form when defining the DISPLAY ARRAY
instruction.
In a model-view-controller paradigm, the DISPLAY
ARRAY intruction acts as the controller, the program array is the
model, and the screen array with the corresponding TABLE container
is the view.
TABLE container of the current
form, you must specify the screen array corresponding to the form table, when declaring the
DISPLAY ARRAY
instruction:DISPLAY ARRAY custarr TO sa_cust.* ATTRIBUTES(UNBUFFERED)In the above code example, custarr is the program array, and
sa_cust is the screen array.
The program array is typically defined as a DYNAMIC ARRAY OF RECORD LIKE
tabname type, that must match the members of the the screen array used
by the DISPLAY ARRAY instruction.
If you do not want to display all columns of the underlying SQL table, a good practice is to
define PHANTOM form fields, to keep the same number of members in both program
array and screen array structures. The data of these hidden columns will be available in the program
array for processing, but are not visible to the user.
However, when the SQL table contains a large number of columns, you should save resources by using only the set of columns that are relevant in the context of the browsable record list.