Kbase 13708: Report Builder and 15 decimal digit limitation
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
10/05/1998 |
|
Report Builder and 15 decimal digit limitation
1) PROGRESS itself can handle up to 50 digits of precsion
for DECIMAL data (of those 50, up to 10 can be to the
right of the decimal point). PROGRESS itself does *not*
support floating-point data. The reason PROGRESS can
support up to 50 digits is that we have our own decimal
arithmetic package that emulates the arithmetic for DECIMAL data.
2) The Report Builder uses floating-point values to represent
all its numeric data. That is, anything that would be INTEGER
or DECIMAL in PROGRESS gets represented in the REPORT Builder
as a floating-point number. On the PC, the floating-point
format allows 64 bits to represent a value; of those,
53 are allowed for the mantissa. With 53 bits, you can
represent about 15 decimal digits' worth of data (regardless
of where the decimal point is).
3) This means that in the Report Builder, the largest
format we can support is 15 decimal digits--this can be
a 15-digit integer, or a number with 10 digits to the
left of the decimal point and five digits to the right,
etc--basically any combination of 15 digits and a decimal
point.
4) In 7.3B, if you try to access a table with one or more
fields that has a format with more than 15 digits, we
will raise an alert box warning you that we're truncating
the field to 15 digits, and then we go on. So you can
use the rest of the fields in the table, and you can even
use the oversized fields provided that the data aren't
actually bigger than 15 digits, or that you are willing
to have us truncate it (note that if you have 16 digits
to the *left* of the decimal point, we can't truncate,
and these values just show up as UNKNOWN).
Progress Software Technical Support Note # 13708