FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

HI Freddy, 

ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT wrote:
> > Next time, I think I'll compile first and post second.  
> > 
> 
> Personally I like the distinction made in C++ that use
> const_cast instead of C style casts... 

Me too.  

> I also don't understand why we need to allocate some memory in order to
> return NULLs... dbgetnull is called only by _set_null_value. Perhaps
> _set_null_value should do all the job without allocation stuff?? But...
> bindval should not be always initialized?? to_free is used only to pass
> data from dbgetnull to _set_null_value, perhaps merging dbgetnull and
> _set_null_value we can remove this field.

Yes, I think we should merge them.  We allocate the memory only to copy it
to the rowbuffer.  Not very smart.  We can write blanks/zeros to the
rowbuffer directly instead.  

The code evolved as I understood what to do.  It's not quite done.  ;-)

> I noted also that we defined a new NULLREP structure with a field
> (capability) that we don't use at all.

We can remove it, now that we we know it's not needed.  

> Why we need a initialize_default_null_representations if
> default_null_representations can be initialized statically (and be
> const)?

Only because it's hard to get right statically.  The array is 19 long with
some gaps.  I didn't want to accidentally set the default null
representation of, say, TINYBIND to be the one that belongs to
DATETIMEBIND.  

> Is correct dbsetnull for VARYBINBIND/VARYCHARBIND?? Perhaps we should
> copy the entire structure?? 

I don't know.  

> I think we don't even support these stranges types...

Not very well.  It's not something I have much use for personally.  Every
time I look into it, I get lost in the rowbuffer code and stop.  

One of these days, I'm going to write bcp_moretext() -- which will mean
yet another slash through the bcp code.  bcp 'IN' should be written in
terms of bcp_bind() and bcp_moretext(), and bcp 'OUT' should use dbbind()
and dbreadtext().  

To get that working, VARYBINBIND will have to work.  All in good time.  

Regards, 

--jkl