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Fldwidth 255, I believe, specifies the MAXIMUM
field width rather than the absolute (ie., the field’s contents are not
padded with spaces- this is like VARCHAR() in SQL rather than CHAR(). So it
should not do any harm to SAS imports – but correct me if I’m wrong
on this.
Prakash
From:
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007
4:13 PM
To:
Subject: [trialdb] Field Width in
Extracts SAS Files
Good
afternoon!
I noticed this piece of code was added to the 2006 version (as opposed
to the 2004 version):
If (Datatype = "S" Or Datatype = "T") Then
fldArgs("FLDWIDTH"
'change all to use the 255 as fldwidth doesn't make sense And fldwidth =
"0"
'note: In TrialDB, widths are not set, since the maximum width is used
anyway for EAV fields
This makes all string and text fields in the SAS program 255 characters
long. In addition to the EAV strings and texts, this also affects
non-EAV data, such as PATIENT_ID, which is string and 15 characters long
in the database. Does this change make sense when dealing with non-EAV
data?
Another question is: was there something seriously wrong with the
widths taken from the metadata that you had to switch to the 255 fixed
width?
Thank you,
Mihai Virtosu
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