Re: *varying vs varchar

On 2022-04-29 11:05 a.m., Charles Wilt wrote:

There is no options(*varchar)

I assume from the title you mean options(*varsize)

options(*varsize) and varchar()/varying are two very different things

...and Jon beat me to the details... :)

Further to what Jon and Charles said, you have to be very careful with OPTIONS(*VARSIZE) to make sure you don't access more storage than the caller passed, especially if you use it without CONST. (But even with CONST you have to be careful ...)

Basically, you need some way of knowing how big the actual parameter is, either by passing the length as a separate parameter, or coding the OPDESC keyword for the prototype and calling CEEDOD to get the length.

Here's the doc for the OPTIONS keyword. With a warning in the *VARSIZE section about accessing too much storage. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzasddoptns.htm