Don Scipione of the Acme Company, and Rose Ann Pascucci of the Surety Title Agency contributed this tech tip to modify their description field to track vital operations information:

Tracking Additional Information

Needs: Acme needed to store additional vital operations information besides that which is already tracked in the Platinum Inventory module.

Solution: To track several related pieces of information, Acme used the Item Description field to track them in a consistent format - item 1 in the first 10 bytes, item 2 in the next 5 bytes, etc. Using Xtrieve, they made another template which redefined the Item Description field so that each item can be accessed independently.

Example:
In a land tile industry application, the policy amount and policy number are needed for reporting after an invoice has been paid.

The standard Platinum template (FILE:ARLINH) with a 40 byte description field.

Don and Rose Ann created a customized template (Location: ARLINHd) in which the 40 bytes have been split into 2 fields: dDESCRIPTION for 13 bytes and ddesc2 for 27 bytes.

Both templates view the data in LOCATION:ARLINH; so dDESCRIPTION and ddesc2 can be independently accessed through the customized template.