Specifying the data type
To override the default behavior and to explicitly specify the data type, a data type indicator must precede the bind value. The syntax for this is:
:bind([T|N|D],value)
The following table shows the data type indicators and the correspondence between each data type indicator and the Informix® data types.
| Data Type Indicator | Informix Data Type |
|---|---|
| T or TEXT | SQL_CHAR |
| N or NUM or NUMBER | SQL_NUMERIC |
| D or DATE | SQL_DATETIME |
For information about item formats and interpretation, refer to "Item properties" .
As an example of specifying a data type, if you want to bind a date value to a statement, it is always necessary to specify that the value is of data type DATETIME. The SQL statement would be entered as:
DBLOOKUP("select Age from Person where DateOfBirth=:bind([DATE]," +
DateItem:Row + ")","DB.mdq","MyDB")