The Quest for an ObjectScript Iterator (part 3)

This is the third part of the series on writing "iterators" in Caché ObjectScript that began with an introduction, and went on to describe Caché's database structure. The aim is to invent abstractions that lets us loop through a global without knowing anything about its structure.

This time, I'll keep it short, and just show the simplest COS iterator. Because in these examples, I am using Caché ObjectScript and not Caché Objects I have no objects to encapsulate index state. So I will use call-by-reference to allow a single Next() function to return both the index and the value of each record which are declared in the caller.

For a simple single key global (here called ^xs) the definition of the iterator is this :

StartIterator(&i)
  set i = ""
  quit
 
Next(&i,&val)
  set i=$order(^xs(i))
  if i="" { quit 0 }
  set val=$get(^xs(i))
  quit 1

And we can use it like so :

test()
  new i,val 
  do StartIterator(.i)
  while $$Next(.i,.val) {
    write !, i_" : "_val ; example "do something"
  }
  quit

You'll see that test(), which represents some kind of business logic, has no direct mention of ^xs and no commitment to its structure (except that there is a single index, i which steps through it).

OK, that's the basic idea. It should be reasonably self-evident if you've even started working with Caché. Next episode, I'll delve into the uglier problems of multi-key globals.

See? Told you this would be a quick one. :-)