Re: just curious - Number of Parms -- RPG400-L

Check out Zip City.  I cannot remember the companies name right now.  If you 
want more info, e-mail me and I will look it up and post it when I am in the 
office.  The post office also has a subscription server for U.S postal codes.  
You can purchase the basic subscription or the full Zip+4 data base with all 
the streets and address ranges.  Of course this is only a data base, and U.S. 
only.

Zip City also gives you time zones and area codes as well as APIs.

Christopher K. Bipes            Mailto:chrisb@cross-check.com
Senior Programmer/Analyst    Http://www.cross-check.com
CrossCheck, Inc.                707 586-0551 x 1102
6119 State Farm Drive       707 586-1884  FAX
Rohnert Park, CA  94928
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <booth@martinvt.com>
To: <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: just curious - Number of Parms


zip codes... my pet peeve.  When people talk about "Object Oriented" I 
come back and ask about a postal code object. 

Why hasn't someone made a postal code blackbox that can be purchased and 
installed for the AS/400?  Included would be the U.S. Postal Codes, with 
the full U.S. Postal Service data.  A company should be able to install a 
piece and when a user types a 9-digit zip code a parm should be returned 
with street, city, state, and country.  And vice-versa.   It should also 
recognize postal code patterns from all foreign post office jurisdictions.

It should also have the capacity to call home to synchronize with Uncle 
Sam's data base so that it is always accurate.


_______________________
Booth Martin
Booth@MartinVT.com
http://www.MartinVT.com
_______________________




Gary Guthrie <GaryGuthrie@home.com>
Sent by: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com
07/28/2000 12:47 AM
Please respond to RPG400-L

 
        To:     RPG400-L@midrange.com
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: just curious - Number of Parms

John,

Okay so we're MOSTLY on the same page. :)

Regarding your following comment, I would strongly argue that you don't
have a customer NUMBER. You have a customer ID! IMO, this is the same
sort of long-standing industry "mistake" that helped lead to the Y2K
(thought I'd NEVER type that letter combination again!) debacle.

With respect to Y2K, insisting on YYMMDD type formats for dates was one
of those habits the industry fell into and stayed in. We all know the
resulting costs. With respect to "Customer Numbers", I submit that it is
much better to move away from that nomenclature and begin referring to
the entities in the fashion of "Customer IDs". Then perhaps we can get
away from defining these entities in the database in a numeric format.
You never know when you're going to need a value that contains something
other than numeric-only data. Now that I've introduced the topic, let me
use a more demonstrative example - Zip Codes.

Limiting the conversation momentarily to the USA, Zip Codes often are
defined as numeric. In fact, in the not so distant past, they were
defined as 5 digits in length. Of course, 9 is a more appropriate length
now. But, all of a sudden your company decides to do business outside of
the USA -- hmm, now we need alpha characters, too! And, there's nothing
that prevents USA standards to change to allow alpha characters.

This having been said, I submit that it's best to leave numeric
definitions to those entities that indicate quantitative data and avoid
the type of problems mentioned.

Thoughts?

Gary Guthrie
REAL Solutions Technical Support
NEWS/400 Technical Editor



> To me the bigger sin(being a data base bigot) is
> using a 15,5 parameter variable for (say) a customer number or invoice
> number when my data dictionary defines it as 7,0.    I want that 
attribute
> of the DB customer entity to cascade everywhere I used customer number.
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