The Email field type specifier is used to declare electronic addresses. The synopsis is:
%typedef: Email_t email
Sometimes it is useful to make fields to store field names. For that purpose the Field field type specifier is supported. The synopsis is:
%typedef: Field_t field
Universally Unique Identifiers (also known as UUIDs) are a way to assign a globally unique label to some object. The uuid field type specifier serves that purpose. The synopsis is:
%typedef: Id_t uuid
The format of the uuids is specified as 32 hexadecimal digits, displayed in five groups separated by hyphens. For example:
550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000
There is one other possible field type, viz: a foreign key.
The following example
defines the type Maintainer_t
to be of type “record Hacker
”;
in other words, a foreign key referring to a record in the Hacker
record set.
%typedef: Maintainer_t rec Hacker
This essentially means that the values
to be stored in fields of type Maintainer_t
are of whatever
type is defined for the primary key of the Hacker
record set.
Why this is useful is discussed later. See Queries which Join Records.