PARADYME specifically prohibits the defining of single valued attributes in the multi-valued field definitions and vice versa. However, there are times when then user wishes to access a specific value in a multi-valued attribute, effectively turning it into a singled valued attribute. Such an example would be where the user only wishes to display the first line of a multi-lined address.

PARADYME allows the user to modify an attribute name defined on a system file layout with a value index suffix. This suffix takes the form of a comma followed by the value index. This index can either be an absolute number or a variable. For instance, the first value of the variable ADDRESS could be referenced by entering:-

ADDRESS,1

If the variable VMC.INDEX was set up to indicate which line of the address to display, then following would be entered for the attribute name.

ADDRESS,VMC.INDEX

Note that this suffix only has any meaning with S, N, R, and D type variables.