Hi,
We have been using a front end for all our production management, and we
have since decided to change the format of our part numbers. The software we
have runs off of Firebird, and since the software offers no utilities to do
what I need (at least with out manually changing them all) I belive the
easiest way to make the changes is just to do them with IBConsole.
Currently our parts are in the form of two letters, followed by the actual
part number ("AA######...." ). What I need to do is parse out the first two
letters of the part number field and update it, leaving only the numbers. As
I see it from reading the Language Reference, I would need to use the substr
funtion to do that acutal parsing and the update command to store it back
in. I have a some what limited knowledge of SQL, having only experienced
MySQL in small, limited, web site implemetations. Knowing that, this is how
I decided to go about it:

update PARTSTABLE set PARTNUM=substr(PARTNUM,2,strlen(PARTNUM)-1) where
PARTNUM like 'AA%';

When I ran that in IBConsole, I got a "variable undefined" error for the
reference to "PARTNUM" that was the first argument in "substr." When I
looked at the docs for the update command I saw this:
Notes on the UPDATE statement

In SQL and isql, you cannot use val as a parameter placeholder (like
"?").

In DSQL and isql, val cannot be a variable.

Since I can't use variables inside this type of statement, I am at a loss as
to how I should go about this. Any help will be appreciated.

TIA,

--Sean






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