HP System Dictionary/XL General Reference Manual Vol 2 - Part 1 SDINIT (32256-90005)

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6 The Loading Process
Overview
This section includes detailed information on how entities and relationships are mapped from Dictionary/V
into System Dictionary.
Loading Definitions
When the LOAD command is issued, the data residing in the Dictionary/V dictionary is retrieved through
the IMAGE intrinsics. SDCONV first converts the entity definitions in the Dictionary/V database. After
all the entity definitions are loaded, the relationships contained in the detail data sets of the Dictionary/V
dictionary are loaded into the System Dictionary. The following paragraphs provide detailed information
about how the Dictionary/V data is mapped into the System Dictionary data.
Loading Entities
SDCONV retrieves entity definitions from the data sets in the following sequence:
DATA-ELEMENT
DATA-FILE
DATA-CATEGORY
DATA-GROUP
DATA-CLASS
DATA-PROCEDURE
DATA-LOCATION
The master data sets listed above are read serially by the DBGET intrinsic. Some of these data sets
contain passive links, e.g. the DESCRIPTION-KEY on most of the data sets above. For these passive
links, a chained read into the linked detail sets (FILE-PATH, FILE-SORT, DESCRIPTION-TEXT) is
performed to retrieve the actual value. The following paragraphs describe, in detail, the loading process
for entities.
DATA-ELEMENT. This data set contains the definitions of elements. Entries in this data set are
assigned the ELEMENT entity type. Each field is mapped according to the following table:
ELEMENT entity name
ELEMENT-NAME entity-long-name attribute
ELEMENT-TYPE element-type attribute
ELEMENT-SIZE display-length attribute
ELEMENT-DEC decimal attribute
ELEMENT-LENGTH byte-length attribute