iTP Active Transaction Pages (iTP ATP) Programmer's Guide

DDL Dictionary Viewer (dview)
iTP Active Transaction Pages (iTP ATP) Programmer’s Guide—522292-002
B-3
Using the Field Object Constructors
•
A function that has the name of the form defarray_message-layout
populates the fields array of the atp.field object representing the message
layout. (Message-layout is the name of the layout you specified.) A script does
not use the fields array to operate on the fields of a message; the array is useful
primarily for dictionary browsers and other tools that retrieve and display
information about message structures.
Note. Unlike the atp.dictionary object, which dynamically accesses the DDL
dictionary and changes the structure of the message in response to changes in the
dictionary, the constructors dview creates are static: the message structure doesn’t
change even if the dictionary changes. Using static constructors helps the performance of
your script by reducing the number of reads from the dictionary file. You can place the
static constructors in a server-side include file to facilitate maintenance.