Table level functions

These functions provide for the creation of, addition to, and retrieval from tables within a Texis database. From the API the retrieval mechanism does not use an index and will retrieve records sequentially from the table. The order is undefined except from BTREE type tables in which case the records will be returned in key order. Rewinddbtbl() can be used to start reading from the beginning of the table again.

A BTREE type table is a special type of table in which the record data is stored in a BTREE. The key is a composite key of all the fields in the record. The keys are used in the same order of importance as they were added to the data definition structure. While BTREE tables offer some advantages for particular situations they also have some limitations. Further indexes cannot be created on the table, and the total record size for any record cannot exceed 8000 bytes.

When a table is created there must be a data definition structure which describes the fields in the table. The structure can be created with opendd(), and closed with closedd(). The data definition structure is populated with calls to putdd(), which is documented in the next section.