Thanks for your help.  This will save many people heartache.
     While I definitely follow the logic I am having a few problems
     with the practicalities.  The specific questions I have are:

     1. How do you output to a file?  The output command seems to only
     have LP or TERM as options.

     2. How do you input from the file?  I guess you can use
     redirection but since I have not figured out the how to output I
     have not tried the input.

     Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

     Thanks,

  ---------------------------------------------------------------
  Barry Durand      "The opinions expressed in this
  Systems Engineer II    email are not necessarily the
  Gulf South Health Plans    opinions of my employer"
  [log in to unmask]
  ---------------------------------------------------------------



______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: QUERY and JOIN and REPLACE
Author:  [log in to unmask] at SMTP-PO
Date:    7/31/97 10:52 PM


Jerry Fochtman wrote:
>At 04:01 PM 7/30/97 CDT, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>>     I am using QUERYNM to attempt to change an item (ILLNESS) in a
>>     dataset (SERVICE) if it fits certain criteria in both the dataset
>>     it is in (SERVICE) and other datasets.  I am using the following
>>     QUERY:
>>
..............................................................................
>>     This query does find the entries I need for it to find BUT for
>>     some reason or another when I try to replace the value in the
>>     item(SERVICE.ILLNESS) QUERYNM returns the message "RECORD HAS NOT
>>     YET BEEN FOUND". When I report the items though they have been
>>     found.
>>
>>     Any ideas of what I am doing wrong?
>
>I seem to recall that QUERY doesn't permit an update to a MULTIFIND,
>so I checked the manual on my CD and under UPDATE REPLACE, found:
>
That's right.  However, there is a workaround.

When you have done your multifind, you create a report that you write out
to a file.  I don't remember all the parameters offhand, but you have to
set something like "NOHEADING" and "NOPAGE" and maybe a couple of other
things to eliminate all the stuff you don't want.  The "text" of this
report consists of a "FIND" wrapped around the key value of the file that
you want to update. The next line of the "report" consists of the command
"UPDATE REPLACE".  Then run query again using the "report" file as command
input.  Obviously, you can have a multitude of "FINDS" in your report, one
for each record you need to update.

There are a lot of sneaky tricks like this that enable QUERY to do some
quite complex things.  This is one of the easier ones.

John D. Alleyn-Day
Alleyn-Day International
408-286-6421   408-286-6474 (Fax)
[log in to unmask]       http://www.Alleyn-Day.com