Jive Special Considerations

Running on a Web Server, Jive has no convenient way to indicate errors. The general Jive solution is to provide default behavior when errors occur. This solution is similiar to that of client browsers processing HTML. Browsers normally skip incorrect or unsupported formulations and continue processing.

In Jive, incorrect formulations are either skipped or produce a result of null. Undefined names, improper qualification, invalid conversions and subscripts out of bounds product a result of null.

Additionally, Jive does not use separators between commands and considers standalone expressions as valid commands. This can cause obscure errors. Leading decimal points and unary signs should be avoided. The following examples illustrate:

   Incorrect                      Use Instead
   if count -count end            if count (-count) end
   if a = b .25 end               if a = b 0.25 end

Similiar problems occur with quoted strings since adjacent strings are combined in Jive. For example, the following incorrect if.

   if verbose = 'yes'  'Use the back button to return. ' end

This code will test if verbose is equal to 'yesUse the back button to return. '. Some correct versions:

   if verbose = 'yes'  "Use the back button to return. " end
   if verbose = 'yes'  ('Use the back button to return. ') end
   if (verbose = 'yes')  'Use the back button to return. ' end

Diagnostic Output

For help in debugging, the Jive Interpreter can output a diagnostic file - jiv.out. If a special name - jivedebug, is defined in the environment or in Form Input, the jiv.out file will be written. Syntax and ODBC errors are written to this file.