Exporting a form object

The format of forms exported before QMF Version 1 Release 2 is different from the format described in this section; however, QMF continues to accept forms exported with an earlier release of QMF. When such forms are imported or displayed in later releases, there can be some performance degradation.

Table and field numbers for the form object lists the assignment of field numbers to the various parts of the form object. It also shows which parts of the form are tables and which are individual values in the exported file. Column data type (field 1112) is not displayed on the form panels but is associated with the form in its external format.

The column data type is not required when a form is imported. If it is missing during import, QMF provides default data type information from the edit codes. See Importing a form object for more information. During export, the data type keyword (field number 1112) QMF provides is based on the specified edit code. For a U, V, or invalid edit code, QMF specifies the data type keyword UNKNOWN. Table 13 shows the data type keywords QMF generates for the edit codes specified. In this table, x represents the number of decimal places to be displayed, where x is an integer from 0 to 99.

Variation panels

When you export a form, QMF only exports those variation panels with values that have been changed from the default. Therefore, the total number of variations in the external form can be less than that shown in the variation count indicator on the panel. QMF can alter the individual variation numbers to put the variations back into a continuous sequence.

Translated forms

When you export a form from a non-English session, you can either export the form in the current session language or in English. Because of this, the national language identifier in the H record might not reflect the language of the session from which you exported the form.