Field Aliases

You may want to give your fields names that are more meaningful to the operators than, say, cparam1. You can accomplish this by defining aliases for your fields in a file named vdb_field_alias.vdef and saving this file in the Vsystem root directory. In this file, create a list of alias and field pairs, as shown in the following example:

You can use tabs or spaces to separate the alias from the field; however, you cannot use any spaces in the alias itself. When defining aliases for fields in the file, you can have only one alias and field pair per line.

To use the defined aliases, Vsystem applications first refer to the environment variable VDB_ALIAS_FILE for the field alias definition file. If this file is not found, the applications check the Vsystem root directory for the vdb_field_alias.vdef file. Any Vsystem application using the vdb_fields_info routine automatically refers to the defined aliases. For example, when adding a text control tool in Vdraw, you can specify db::chan@max. (For information about the vdb_fields_info routine, see Chapter 4, Library of Database Access Routines , in your Vsystem Vaccess Reference Guide.