I am working with a software developer who has a vertical market cargo program. We will be importing customer & vendor profiles as well as transactions into Adagio. During this exercise the question came up as to the difference between Adagio’s CHAR and RCHAR data types as specified in the Data Dictionary.
I am very familiar with the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR data types in SQL. In the Adagio environment are CHAR data fields fixed length, right padded and VARCHAR variable length with trailing spaces?

Hi Brian,

RCHAR fields are right justified, zero trimmed and blank filled. CHAR fields are left justified and usually blank trimmed.

The easiest way to get data into Adagio is to set up an Import template and import the master file or transaction information from either a text file (CSV or blocked records) or an Excel spreadsheet. The import process can delete the file on successful processing of the import. Imports can be automatically process on module start up.

I am very familiar with importing into Adagio. The other guy is an SQL tekkie and he was curious about the described data structures. Thanks for the info.

Another question that he raised that had never occurred to me - date fields are listed in the AR data dictionary as being 3 characters. I have never had a problem importing using the Adagio import templates, but this did arouse my curiosity. Are they really 3 characters?

yy/mm/dd stored in individual bytes. Each byte can hold a number between 0 and 255. NULL dates are stored as 0/0/0.