What's the point of the "/" after defining something in webfocus?

Question

I'm currently learning webfocus and I'm learning about defining, but what is teaching me isn't doing a great job. An example that has been given to me is about cars. If I want to make a new field to find the difference between the retail cost and the dealer cost, they said to input

DEFINE FILE CAR
CALCULATED_DIFFERENCE/D5 = RETAIL_COST - DEALER_COST
END

What I'm confused about is what the

/D5

is there for. Is it required to define a file? Does it have to be something specific? I've researched a lot but haven't found any answers about it.

Answer 1

I've found out what it means. The /D5 is known as formatting. It allows WebFOCUS to know what is being used in the file. The D stands for decimal, which means that if I wanted to I could format it as D/5.2 and an A stands for alphanumeric. If I were to define a file called person_last_name, I would use A/30. The number determines how much data it can hold, so 30 is all I need as a person's last name probably won't be longer than 30 characters.

Answer 2

From what I understand, it joins the aliases and roots. For example the D could be short for difference. The 5 could just be a number. Without all of the example and question it's hard to say.

Here is another example http://www.hwconline.com/ibi_html/javaassist/intl/EN/help/source/topic547.htm

Section

A preceding forward slash '/' is required for all aliases and context roots. The WebFOCUS Administration Console automatically adds a forward slash if one was not entered.

I am assuming it could be a pointer. Look at the url and the / indicates like a tree node. If you want to get to a location then it's location/location/location/here

here being what your looking at. So if the /D5 is called it could mean page/page/page/Difference5 so for short it omits all of the pages and signifies the direct alias D5.

I am not entirely sure but that is what I have always thought. Look at everything dealing with locations a \ or / is always used.