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    How are lines with wildcards read: "first match" or "reads whole table"?

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    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 20

    Description:
    How are lines with wildcards read? Does the system use the first match it finds, or does it always look through the whole table for a specific match.

    Say you have these lines in tab16:

    MAIN 16 ## ## + 00000060 30 A 2359 0000 00000 999 999 7 + 00000014 014 25.0000000 15.0000000 0000000000 000 3 02
    MAIN 16 ## 15 + 00000060 30 A 2359 0000 00000 040 000 7 + 00000014 014 25.0000000 15.0000000 0000000000 000 3 00
    MAIN 16 ## 18 + 00000060 30 A 2359 0000 00000 040 000 7 + 00000014 014 25.0000000 15.0000000 0000000000 000 3 00

    and the circ situation involves item status 16 and patron status 15, will it find the second line -- or will it use the first?

    Resolution:
    The system looks for the first matching line and uses that.

    Though there may be some exceptions in how the tables are read, the best practice is to always place lines with wildcards *after* lines with specific values.

    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013