comparison strength in Natural?

With Tamino (and I think Adabas also now) you can specify a “comparison strength” that will allow you to select what level of comparisons will yield “equal” results (impacts sorts and logical comparisons). For example, one level allows case-insensitive comparisons (“Fred” = “FRED”) and another allows character groups insensitivity ("Fr

Hi Doug;

Saw this done in Adabas a long time ago with a hyper descriptor. Basically, it reduced a field to all lower case. Of course, you also had to do the work in your program to create lower case arguments for a FIND. e.g. FIND ORDERS WITH HYPER-COMPANY-NAME = #CONVERTED-VALUE, where #CONVERTED-VALUE was an all lower case version of a field entered on a Map.

steve

http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/documentation/adabas/ada514unw/admin/fdtrec.htm#fdtreccol

With UES and ICU support in Adabas, you would just add a “Collation Descriptor” and specify the strength you need (Primary, Secondary, etc). Presumably more than one collation descriptor could be defined on a field(s) with different strengths, if that was needed.

What I’m looking for is something similar in Natural so when my code is sorting or comparing - something like “if collationcompare(#a,#b,primary) = true” and “sort #a with collationstrength secondary”

Since this support doesn’t seem to be in Natural yet, I posted an Enhancement Proposal #5128 (http://servline24.softwareag.com/SecuredServices/RequestManagement/NewRQM/ModifyEP/modEPfrm.asp?EP=5128)

If this is something you could use also, feel free to add your comments (enhancement requests with more customer support / business cases get more traction with Product Management).