HiFinance
5
APPENDIX A - COLLATING SEQUENCE
Throughout HiFinance the standard ASCII collating
sequence is used. This means that when alphanumeric (numbers and letters) are
sorted, they will be sorted into the order defined by the ASCII standard.
Simply put, the ASCII sort sequence places numbers
first, followed by capital letters, followed by lower-case letters. Some
special characters come before the numbers and some after. Special characters
are rarely used and can generally be ignored. Exceptions include spaces and
hyphens, which come before numbers in the ASCII collating sequence.
All alphanumeric sorting starts from the left-hand
character. This means that AAA comes before AAB, which comes before AbA. Also, if numbers are sorted
as if they were alphanumeric, 10 comes
before 2. The only way to
make numbers sort correctly in an alphanumeric field is to pad them with
leading zeros i.e. 02 comes before 10.
The ASCII collating sequence affect three places in
HiFinance.
1) When a
report, such as the CREDITOR AGED
ANALYSIS, is sorted by CREDITOR CODE,
the final order of the report will be dictated by the ASCII collating sequence.
2) When
searching through a file, the search proceeds via the ASCII sequence. If all
your codes are in upper case, an initial search of a will immediately send you
past the end of the file, giving you the appropriate error message.
3) Many
reports ask for a range of codes. You will notice that the default answers in
all cases is a blank entry as the lower limit and all lower case z's as the upper limit. If you enter A as the lower limit and Z as the upper limit, you will miss all codes that start with a number
and all codes that start with a lower case letter. You will, in this case, also
miss all codes that start with a Z, except Z itself. This is not the result you would expect intuitively, so it is
worth thinking about for a moment.
The above effects mean that consistency is
particularly important if you wish reports to make sense and sequential
searching to be useful. It is recommended that you choose to have either all
upper case codes or all lower case codes in your Debtor, Creditor and
Inventory master files. In some places this is forced and in others, it can be forced
by setting the correct option in the SYSTEM
UTILITIES - SECTION 7.1.2.
You can enter addresses, etc., in either case, as
these are not used as sort fields. Sequential searches, such as in Debtors,
that search through addresses and names, usually have the option to ignore case.
Care should be taken if you disable this option.
Further information regarding ASCII, can be found in
your MS-DOS, Windows or Unix manual.
