A DATALOAD statement usually describes the fields of the input file and the columns of the table which are to be used for loading. In some cases, however, the table contains an additional attribute (e.g., origin of the data) which is not included in the input file because it is given the same value in each row generated from the file.
For this case, a constant instead of a position specification may be inserted into the DATALOAD statement:
Example:
DATALOAD TABLE item
itno 01-08
descr 09-39 NULL IF POS 09-11 = ' '
stock 40-43 INTEGER NULL IF POS 40-43 INTEGER < '0'
min_stock '50'
INFILE ...
The constant must always be enclosed in single quotation marks to distinguish it from position specifications.
During loading, the constant is treated as a plaintext input value of the file and is converted into the format of the target column.
If the constant is to be loaded into a numerical column, it must have a valid numerical format, which means it must either be a floating point number in mantissa/exponent representation or a fixed point number in the currently determined or the default decimal representation.
If the input file is empty, constants that may have been specified are not loaded either.