Formatting Dollar Amounts

Using conversions to format dollar amounts is a typical example. The Attribute Definition item for AMOUNT (amount of sale) in the ORDERS dictionary contains a conversion to produce a formatted dollar amount:

>LIST-ITEM DICT ORDERS 'AMOUNT'

AMOUNT

001 A

002 0

003 AMOUNT

004

005

006

007 MR2$

008 A;N(QTY)*N(PRICE)

009 R

010 10

The conversion MR2$ specifies the format of the dollar amount. The M specifies that numeric data is being converted. The format of the amount is specified as:

Right-justification of the amount (R)
Two digits follow the decimal point (2)
A dollar sign precedes the amount ($)

Assume, then, that the price of an item is stored as cents. Multiplying by the quantity will produce a result in cents. If this result is 1100, the above conversion will produce a result of:

$11.00

If an INFO/ACCESS report included the AMOUNT attribute, the conversion code would ensure that all of the dollar amounts were right-justified and, therefore, properly lined-up.

Note that the amount of sale is actually derived by a correlative that multiplies the attribute QTY by the attribute PRICE. This correlative is discussed in the Manipulating Existing Data section.