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Mdot gotcha with SQL alias M
Message
From
08/07/2010 23:51:36
Mike Yearwood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
 
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Databases,Tables, Views, Indexing and SQL syntax
Environment versions
Visual FoxPro:
VFP 9 SP2
OS:
Vista
Network:
Windows 2008 Server
Database:
MS SQL Server
Application:
Desktop
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01471907
Message ID:
01471945
Views:
67
>I don't see why do you have to keep m alias in the first place.

It's an inherited app and it will take time to undo this mess everywhere M alias is used. Just try to keep track of 13 different single letter aliases in a query. A is for invoice and b is for customer and c is for something and so on. Sheesh! How about Inv and Cus and Som as abbreviations. First time I've ever seen m.fieldname not mean a memvar!

>
>>
>>Here's an interesting problem I found in an application I inherited.
>>
>>I strongly advise against single letter aliases in SQL and in VFP from the perspective of readability and maintainability. Be especially careful with M as an alias in VFP SQL.
>>
>>create table tmpinvoices free (field1 c(10))
>>local ltDatetime
>>ltDatetime = datetime()
>>select m.field1,m.ltDatetime as tdatetime from tmpinvoices m into cursor c_Result
>>
>>You will get an error that column ltDatetime is not found. OK. So drop the m. from ltDatetime, but now you are slowing your query - admittedly very little, but I don't like doing things half-fast. ;)
>>
>>I tried to add this to the mdot topic on the wiki, but my changes are not being saved.
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