Because PowerBuilder knows nothing about the commands and functions of the server application, it also knows nothing about the datatypes of returned information when it compiles a program. Expressions that access properties and call functions have a datatype of Any. You can assign the expression to an Any variable, which avoids datatype conversion errors.
During execution, when data is assigned to the variable, it temporarily takes the datatype of the value. You can use the ClassName function to determine the datatype of the Any variable and make appropriate assignments. If you make an incompatible assignment with mismatched datatypes, you will get a runtime error.
Do not use the Any datatype unnecessarily
If you know the datatype of data returned by a server automation
function, do not use the Any datatype. You
can assign returned data directly to a variable of the correct type.
The following sample code retrieves a value from Excel and assigns it to the appropriate PowerBuilder variable, depending on the value’s datatype. (For an Excel 95 spreadsheet, the row and column arguments for cells are in parentheses instead of square brackets.)
string stringval double dblval date dateval any anyval anyval = myoleobject.application.cells[1,1].value CHOOSE CASE ClassName(anyval) CASE "string" stringval = anyval CASE "double" dblval = anyval CASE "datetime" dateval = Date(anyval) END CHOOSE
