Size of strings again

[Soner]

Hello,
first I read this:
http://zeoslib.sourceforge.net/viewtopic.php?t=3595
I think TField.Size can be used for character length. TField.DataSize can be used for needed bytes to save.
Here is informations from emba and fpc.
http://docs.embarcadero.com/products/ra ... _Size.html

• https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fc ... .size.html

http://docs.embarcadero.com/products/ra ... aSize.html
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fc ... asize.html

I am using FirebirdSQL. For FireBird you can get fieldsize and charakterlength with this commands:

Code: Select all

SELECT b.RDB$RELATION_NAME, b.RDB$FIELD_NAME,  c.RDB$FIELD_LENGTH, c.RDB$CHARACTER_LENGTH FROM RDB$RELATION_FIELDS b
INNER JOIN RDB$FIELDS c ON c.RDB$FIELD_NAME = b.RDB$FIELD_SOURCE
WHERE  b.RDB$SYSTEM_FLAG = 0
ORDER BY b.RDB$RELATION_NAME, b.RDB$FIELD_POSITION

For one Varchar(20) field you get:
c.RDB$FIELD_LENGTH = 80
c.RDB$CHARACTER_LENGTH =20

And the:
TZQSQL.Field.Datasize=81
TZQSQL.Field.Size=80
I think TZQSQL.Field.Size sould be 20. I want to change this for my Zeos.
Now my Question is, when I change TField.Size to real character length will this cause other problems or side effects?
and In which units of zeos-comments have to change it? There is too many units I searched for ".size" found something else.

[marsupilami]

Hello Soner,

you are joining a long standing discussion here with that topic. First: For Zeos with Delphi things already should be correct because the DataSize of the TStringField is writable there.

With FPC things are different. FPC core developers have the opinion that AnsiString is meant to be 1 character per byte. No discussion. UTF8 and MBCS are hacks for them. This is why the DataSize property of TStringField is readonly and hardcoded as one byte per character. They would however accept an implementation of a TUTF8StringField, if one was to supply one. Needless to say, that I didn't getz around to doing that.
I had a discussion with Egonhugeist that usually we would have to map everything Unicode and MBCS to using WideString Field to get some decent UnicodeSupport with correct size attributes.

As a side note: I seem to remember that FPC core developers have the same opinion about Widestrings. Widestrings have to be two bytes ber character. Surrogate pairs are not their problem. So the support of TWideStringField effectively only covers the Basic Multilingual Plane. As far as I remember the same goes for Delphi.

Egonhugeist has prepared replacements for Delphi and Freepascal Fields. I am not sure if they already support UTF8 correctly but we could be more free with them. They are not yet activated per default currently.

With best regards,

Jan

[Soner]

Thanks for the explanation.
Now I chose third way, I read the charakter lenth once then set in in controls (i.e. TDBEdit.MaxLength).
Best wishes.