Introduction
The horizontal table access is one of the four basic table access methods where this one accesses multiple cells in the same table row. Multiple columns can be specified with following approaches:
- Horizontal table access using sets
- Horizontal table access using wildcards with the colon (:) prefix
- Horizontal table access using ranges with the '..' or leaving out the column specification to access all exsting columns
The value(s) read from the table will be provided in a set. This does also apply if only one or even no value being retrieved. In the latter case, an empty set is returned. Coming to write access, writing to the destination will stop whenever either one of the two conditions is met first:
- All elements in the set have been written (not all specified cells in the table are updated),
- The specified number of cells in the table is smaller than the number of elements in the set (not all elements are written to the table).
Read Accesses
The value(s) read from the table will be provided in a set, regardless of the number of cells accessed. Empty sets are returned if the read access results in no matches (e.g. empty set for headers specified, wildcard yields no match, specified range is in the wrong (right to left) direction.
Write Accesses
When writing a set horizontally to a table, then the elements of the set will be written. The write access stops prematurely if one of the two conditions are met: an empty set is returned. Coming to write access, writing to the destination will stop whenever either one of the two conditions is met first:
- All elements in the set have been written (not all specified cells in the table are updated). Writing empty sets will not result in a write opration because there is nothing to write.
- The specified number of cells in the table is smaller than the number of elements in the set (not all elements are written to the table).
Note:If an element in the set is in turn a set, then it will be converted to a string in order to visualize the set contents (with braces around, elements separated with commas).
Alternatively, when writing a value (not set) to a table, then the same value will be written into all cells as specified with the horizontal table access.