RE: *varying vs varchar

[Greg Wilburn <gwilburn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barbara, Jon, & Scott... thank you all for the replies.  I'm will fix this today.  I have a feeling that all the programs that call this are passing CHAR(6). 
So regardless of whether I change the parameters to VARCHAR when I remove the *VARSIZE, I will still have to locate and recompile all the programs calling this procedure.

I wish I could figure out where this went off the rails - I'm certain it was mainly due to my confusion with *VARYING and *VARSIZE.  

Again, thank you all so much for your help and explanations.

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Barbara Morris
Sent: Saturday, April 30, 2022 1:54 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: *varying vs varchar

On 2022-04-29 4:46 p.m., Greg Wilburn wrote:
> That would be me... This was originally written in fixed format and I used a converter to convert to /free format a while back.  That could be part of the problem (and/or my confusion about VARCHAR and *VARSIZE).
>
> So when I remove *varsize and recreate the service program, will I likely need to recompile all the programs that call it?  Or will they be OK?

Earlier posts in this thread have talked about making it a 
varying-length parameter. That would be good in general, but if you do 
change it to have type VARCHAR, then you need to recompile all the callers.

So just removing OPTIONS(*VARSIZE) will be easiest.

But you will still have to recompile all the callers that were compiled 
with OPTIONS(*VARSIZE).