PARSE

Use the PARSE command to parse a specified group of expressions. When the argument can be parsed, PARSE determines the number of expressions in it and their text, object type, data type, and the number and names of their dimensions. This information is stored internally by Oracle OLAP, but can be obtained with the INFO function.

A PARSE statement is especially useful when you want to accept expressions as arguments to a program.

Syntax

PARSE text-expression

Arguments

text-expression: A text expression that contains one or more smaller expressions to be parsed. When you are processing program arguments, you can specify ARGS as the text expression that contains all the arguments for the program.

Notes

Obtaining Information Produced by a PARSE Statement

See INFO for an explanation of how to obtain the information produced by a PARSE statement.

Examples

Example 21-27 Parsing the Arguments to a Program

In a simple report program, you want to specify the data to be reported as an argument to the program. You want to be able to specify an expression, as well as the name of a data variable.

Suppose you want to display each of the arguments with a different column width, which means you must process the arguments individually. The ARGS function can only process them together. So you use PARSE and INFO to parse the arguments and produce individual columns for each of them. Here is a sample program.

DEFINE report1 PROGRAM
PROGRAM
PUSH month product district DECIMALS
DECIMALS = 0
LIMIT month TO FIRST 2
LIMIT product TO ALL
LIMIT district TO 'Chicago'
PARSE ARGS
REPORT ACROSS month WIDTH 8 <&INFO(PARSE FORMULA 1) -
   WIDTH 13 &INFO(PARSE FORMULA 2)>
POP month product district DECIMALS
END

When you run the program, you can supply either the names of variables (such as sales) or expressions (such as sales-expense) or one of each as arguments. The following REPORT statement produces the illustrated report.

report1 sales sales-expense
 
DISTRICT: CHICAGO
             --------------------MONTH--------------------
             --------JAN95--------- --------FEB95---------
PRODUCT       SALES   SALES-EXPENSE  SALES   SALES-EXPENSE
------------ -------- ------------- -------- -------------
Tents          29,099         1,595   29,010         1,505
Canoes         45,278           292   50,596           477
Racquets       54,270         1,400   58,158         1,863
Sportswear     72,123         7,719   80,072         9,333
Footwear       90,288         8,117   96,539        13,847