Chapter 5
Working with Data
Data—it's the reason you work with applications, write applications, and interact with computers at all. The biggest investment for any company isn't the hardware or the software, but the data manipulated by computers. Consequently, understanding data is potentially the most important part of learning how to write IDEA applications. Without an appreciation of data in all its forms, you won't be able to gain a complete understanding of how to manipulate it and your efforts in writing an application will prove frustrating at best—economically disastrous at worst.
This chapter helps you understand data from several perspectives. First, you look at data from the computer's point of view and then you view it from the IDEAScript perspective.
These two viewpoints will serve to help you understand the way your application works with data and avoid making mistakes in performing data manipulation.
Data comes in a number of types in IDEAScript. Type describes the kind of data—how it's viewed by IDEAScript. These types help you categorize the data and choose the right type for a particular need. In addition, you discover how to convert one data type into another data type. Data conversion is important because it ensures that your application handles the data correctly.
The final part of the chapter begins your journey in data manipulation. You discover how to use operators to modify the data. For example, when you add two numbers together, you use the + operator ...
