EGL Reference Guide for iSeries
A COBOL name begins with a letter and comprises from one to 30 characters from
the following set: letters A-Z, digits 0-9, and the hyphen or minus sign
(-).
An EGL part name may be aliased for any of the following reasons:
- The part name contains invalid COBOL characters
- The part name contains lowercase letters
- The part name is longer than a maximum length
- The part name is not unique in the program
- The part name is a COBOL reserved word
In all cases, all characters are made upper case.
For a subset of parts (specifically, a program, data table, form, form
group, or library), you can specify an alias by assigning a value to the
alias property; and if that value is too long or has
characters that are not valid in COBOL, an error occurs. If you did not
specify a value for the property and if the value of the part name is too
long, the part name is truncated to the maximum, which varies by part
type:
- For data tables, 7
- For forms, 8
- For form groups, 6
- For libraries, 8
- For programs, 8
For the other parts (data items, functions, and records), EGL aliases names
as follows:
- Each character that is not valid in COBOL is replaced with an
X, except that each underscore is replaced with a hyphen (-);
for example, TEMP_ITEM becomes TEMP-ITEM
- Part names that are longer than a maximum length are changed as
follows:
- The name is prefixed with the letters EZE, a hyphen, and a
one-to-five-digit number that is unique to the program
- The new name is truncated to the maximum length
The maximum length varies by part type:
- For data items, 27
- For functions, 18
- For records, 18
- If after the previous steps the part name is a duplicate name in the
program, the prefix described earlier is added to the beginning of the second
and any subsequent occurrences of the part name. The resulting alias is
truncated to the maximum length as stated above.
- If after steps 1-3 the part name matches a COBOL reserved word, the prefix
described earlier is added to the beginning of the part name and the resulting
alias is truncated to the maximum length as stated above.
- If after steps 1-4 the part name begins or ends with a hyphen, the
beginning or ending hyphen is changed to X.
Related concepts
COBOL reserved-word file
Related reference
Format of COBOL reserved-word file
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