Unknown UDT elements

[Cliff Nichols]

Colin got me thinking on UDT's and if you do not know how many elements you may or may not have over to "Passing UDT values to DLLs"
and maybe crossing over to my "Get that DataType"

So it got me to thinking if there may be some "Mad-Scientist" idea of possibly having a UDT, or some set of functions to fill in a UDT of unknown size and values until runtime??????

One idea I had included what I have been told is not only unsupported, but also not advised, but see it in the "Win32Api.inc" is using an array within a UDT (Yes I know...tons of research to do, but its just an idea and even I would not support it till tested, but just grasping at straws that just MIGHT might pan out...if not then nothing lost)
Just for the sake of trying....is it worth trying? or will the 99.9% of you say what I usually do and have ideas why it should not / can not be done?
(Or is it just crazy enough that it might just work????)

[Michael Mattias]

GLOBAL MEM ALLOC size TO hMem

Pass 'hMem AS LONG'

Make contents self-describing.

Done.

MCM

[John Montenigro]

So it got me to thinking if there may be some "Mad-Scientist" idea of possibly having a UDT, or some set of functions to fill in a UDT of unknown size and values until runtime??????

I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean. Could you describe the situation a little more explicitly?

How would you have a UDT that was unknown in size and values? How would they be unknown "until runtime"?


Are you looking for a "meta-data" UDT that would describe another UDT?

TYPE UDT_DESCRIPTOR_TYPE
 membername as string * %somelen
 membertype as string * %somelen
 memberlength as long
END TYPE

local MyUDT() as UDT_DESCRIPTOR_TYPE
dim MyUDT(1 to 3) 
MyUDT(1).membername = "StudentFirstName"
MyUDT(1).membertype = "string"
MyUDT(1).memberlength = 15

MyUDT(2).membername = "StudentLastName"
MyUDT(2).membertype = "string"
MyUDT(2).memberlength = 25

MyUDT(3).membername = "StudentID"
MyUDT(3).membertype = "string"
MyUDT(3).memberlength = 8

...

trying to figure out how you'd use something like that???

TYPE DYNAMIC_UDT_TYPE
 MyUDT(1).membername AS MyUDT(1).membertype * MyUDT(1).memberlength 
 MyUDT(2).membername AS MyUDT(2).membertype * MyUDT(2).memberlength 
 MyUDT(3).membername AS MyUDT(3).membertype * MyUDT(3).memberlength 
END TYPE

But I don't think we don't have dynamic TYPE defintions; they have to be defined before compiling...???


Is this more appropriate to a macro????


As I said, I'm a bit unclear on what you're looking for. Any detail you could add would help...

-John

[Jeff Blakeney]

So it got me to thinking if there may be some "Mad-Scientist" idea of possibly having a UDT, or some set of functions to fill in a UDT of unknown size and values until runtime??????

Isn't that what XML is for?