----- Original Message -----

From: Prakash Nadkarni

To: trialdb@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 6:03 PM

Subject: RE: [trialdb] Field Width in Extracts SAS Files

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

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From: trialdb@yahoogroups.com [mailto:trialdb@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Mihai Virtosu
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 4:13 PM
To: trialdb@yahoogroups.com
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") = 255
'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