Return value - Character

SYS(20) is used to order fields containing German words and names. The fields are ordered to resemble the ordering in a German phone book - upper- and lowercase are intermixed, eszets sort immediately after double s, and characters with umlauts sort immediately after the unadorned character followed by the letter e.

SYS(15) can also be used for indexing and sorting fields that contain diacritical marks.

SYS(20) transforms the character expression expC. The numeric expression expN specifies the number of characters in expC to transform, starting with the first character in expC. Any additional characters after the position specified by expN are ignored. The length of the character string returned by SYS(20) is 2 * expN + 10 characters, with a maximum length of 254 characters.

In the following example, the CONTACT field contains the names of customers. This field is indexed using SYS(20) and the first 20 characters in the field. A structural index tag named GCONTACT is created.

Copy Code

USE CUSTOMER INDEX ON SYS(20, contact, 20) TAG gcontact

Other Resources

Backward-Compatible Language Elements