To fetch records, you must first define the set of records that you want ABL to fetch. For example, the following statement defines the set of all Customer records:

FOR EACH Customer:

ABL allows you to define a set of records in a variety of ways. You define the set of records in a Record phrase. For more information on the syntax of Record phrases, see ABL Reference.

You can specify a Record phrase for the following ABL statements:

• FIND
• FOR [ EACH ]
• OPEN QUERY
• DO PRESELECT
• REPEAT PRESELECT

The examples that follow illustrate some of the flexibility that you have when defining a set of records. The Record phrases are highlighted. You can build complex Record phrases using the AND and OR operands.

This example defines a set of one record (Customer 11):

FIND Customer WHERE Customer.CustNum = 11.

This example uses the word-indexed field Comments to define a set of records (all Customer records containing the word "ship"):

FOR EACH Customer WHERE Customer.Comments CONTAINS "ship":

This example creates the subset of all Order records with the Customer number = 11:

OPEN QUERY ordqry FOR EACH Order WHERE Order.CustNum = 11.

This example defines a set of Customer records (those between 25 and 50) to be preselected:

REPEAT PRESELECT EACH Customer 
  WHERE Customer.CustNum > 25 AND Customer.CustNum < 50: