Populating multiple fields with one value

Hi Madelene,

There are a few options, depending what you want to achieve.

If you want to populate several (independent) fields with the same value, then you can either use several COPY statements, or one COPY with several in/outbound fields:

If you want to populate all subfields of a field or all fields of a segment, then you can use PATHCOPY:

I use this last one mostly to clear a certain field or segment.

Madelene,

Just be careful that none of your Destinations are multiple component fields specified at the field level as all of the Source will first be copied to fill as many components as possible.

For this reason, I use multiple COPYs.

Let’s say you want to populate PID-5 and PID-6 with something like ‘hello’.

Source                              Destination

=hello                               0(0).PID(0).#5(0)

=hello                               0(0).PID(0).#6(0)

Note that both destinations are exprssed at the field level but it just so happens both of these fields are multiple component fields.

Now what you want is something like this:

PID|||||hello|hello

What you will get is this:

PID|||||hello^hello

Note PID-6 is not populated at all but both of your ‘hello’s went to component 1 and component 2 of the PID-5 field.

Of course you could use component and/or subcomponent level notation in your destinations and that would be corrected.

Again, I just perfer to have multiple COPYs. With Copy and Paste that is not so bad.

Good info Jim.