Looping through a table

You can use the PERFORM . . . VARYING statement to initialize a table. In this form of the PERFORM statement, a variable is increased or decreased and tested until a condition is satisfied.

About this task

Thus you use the PERFORM statement to control looping through a table. You can use either of these forms:


PERFORM . . . WITH TEST AFTER  . . . . VARYING . . . UNTIL . . .
PERFORM . . . [WITH TEST BEFORE] . . . VARYING . . . UNTIL . . .

The following section of code shows an example of looping through a table to check for invalid data:


PERFORM TEST AFTER VARYING WS-DATA-IX
      FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-DATA-IX = 12
   IF WS-DATA (WS-DATA-IX) EQUALS SPACES
      SET SERIOUS-ERROR TO TRUE
      DISPLAY ELEMENT-NUM-MSG5
   END-IF
END-PERFORM
INSPECT . . .

When control reaches the PERFORM statement above, WS-DATA-IX is set equal to 1 and the PERFORM statement is executed. Then the condition WS-DATA-IX = 12 is tested. If the condition is true, control drops through to the INSPECT statement. If the condition is false, WS-DATA-IX is increased by 1, the PERFORM statement is executed, and the condition is tested again. This cycle of execution and testing continues until WS-DATA-IX is equal to 12.

The loop above controls input-checking for the 12 fields of item WS-DATA. Empty fields are not allowed in the application, so the section of code loops and issues error messages as appropriate.