The OpenEdge Hive - Tips And Tricks

Fastest "1 TO x" loop when x is not a constant

dlauzon — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:57:53 +0000

It's ~30% faster to use "DO i = x TO 1 BY -1" than the closest "DO i = 1 TO x", even when x is calculated before the loop,

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

COMPILE with optimal PROPATH

dlauzon — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:56:16 +0000

Make sure that the PROPATH in use at the time you use the COMPILE statement have the source code folders available as the first folders. That's also true for the PROPATH used by OE Architect's syntax analysis.

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

DO loop instead of REPEAT

dlauzon — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:34:50 +0000

The DO loop constructs are much faster than the REPEAT loop (when you don't need the extra that REPEAT provides... if you don't know what the extra is, you probably don't need it).

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

Fastest way to aggregate a character list

dlauzon — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:34:05 +0000

The fastest way to aggregate a list of character values when all values are non null is to *always* add the delimiter *before* the next element inside the loop and remove it afterward with cList = SUBSTRING(cList, LENGTH(cDelimiter) + 1)

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

SEARCH for file existence

dlauzon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:11:44 +0000

The SEARCH function is 30 to 70% faster than FILE-INFO:FILE-NAME to test for file existence if you expect that the file searched exists most of the time (if the file does not exist, both methods are equivalent).

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

Fastest way to test that a character value contains nothing

dlauzon — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:03:44 +0000

When you want to verify that a character value does not contain any character (i.e. it is "" or ?), using the construct TRUE <> (someCharacterExpression > "") is your best buy

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

FORWARD-ONLY on QUERY

dlauzon — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:41:02 +0000

Use FORWARD-ONLY = TRUE on a QUERY that just goes from a record to the next (as a "FOR EACH" does).

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

For temp-tables, let ABL fail on unique index instead of using a CAN-FIND prior to creating each record

dlauzon — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:06:03 +0000

When adding records to a temp-table having at least a unique index, it can be faster to trap the ABL error generated on a collision instead of using a CAN-FIND prior to creating each record.

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

ASSIGN for speed when assigning variables or fields.

dlauzon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:31:54 +0000

Assigning values to any number of variables is always faster when grouped in an ASSIGN statement compared to being set independently.

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group

Fastest way to test that a character value contains something

dlauzon — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:59:16 +0000

When you want to verify that a character value contains characters, using the construct:
someCharacterValue > ""
is, on average in my test, 10% (for a void string) to 27% (for a ? string) faster than the second fastest construct (not to mention that it is also shorter to type; not to mention that it is also 33% to 50% faster then the slowest of the constructs presented here)

ABL(4GL) General Programming Group