In Use Basic ABL Constructs, you learned how to write both internal and external procedures. In Run ABL Procedures, you learned how to use the RUN statement to invoke one procedure from another. There is a lot more to using procedures in ABL (Advanced Business Language), however, and this section covers these additional topics. In this section, you learn how to:
  • Treat procedures as objects with standard behavior and independence from other procedures.
  • Build what amounts to classes of behavior using multiple separate procedures that all contribute to the definition of the application’s behavior.
  • Use procedures in ways that go beyond the top-down calling sequence you have been introduced to.
Note: This section pertains to procedure-based applications. ABL persistent procedures allow you to create and manage objects in which most of the relationships between them are created and managed at run time. ABL classes, on the other hand, define a well-structured object type that ABL recognizes at compile time. For more information on ABL classes, see Develop Object-Oriented ABL Applications.