You already saw several uses of the DEFINE statement. You defined program variables for your procedures with the DEFINE VARIABLE statement. You also saw the AppBuilder-generated DEFINE BUTTON statements for the four buttons in the Customers and Orders window you built in Introduction to the OpenEdge AppBuilder.

These two forms are representative of two basic ways you can use the DEFINE statement, one to define a variable for a data value that is viewed in a particular way and the other to define an object that does not represent a data value. In this section, you look at the two forms in a general way. Then later, you look at specific types of objects you define in each way.