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DESCRIBE

Other versions: 7.31 | 7.40 | 7.54

Syntax Forms

Field Properties

1. DESCRIBE FIELD ...

Properties of an Internal Table

2. DESCRIBE TABLE ...

Distance Between Two Fields

3. DESCRIBE DISTANCE ...

Effect

You can use the variants of the statement DESCRIBE listed above to specify some of the properties that have data objects at runtime.

Notes

• The statement DESCRIBE is used to determine the properties of data objects of elementary data types. When DESCRIBE is used for structures or data objects of deep data types like strings, internal tables, or reference variables, you can only determine elementary properties. Additional information, for example, the static or dynamic type of a reference variable cannot be determined by DESCRIBE. For this kind of information, use the type description classes of Run Time Type Services (RTTS). These enable you to determine all data object properties of all data types. Since the functions of the RTTS type description classes comprise the complete functions of the DESCRIBE statement, the system classes can be used instead of the statement.
• The variant DESCRIBE LIST specifies the properties of lists in the list buffer.
  

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DESCRIBE FIELD

DESCRIBE TABLE

DESCRIBE DISTANCE

DESCRIBE - internal variant