Why Can I pass Fixed length strings as parameters to VsamEx or VB/ISAM Functions?
In VB, all parameters that are defined as strings for VB/ISAM are required to be variable length. Some of the parameters that are passed to VB/ISAM functions will return variable length string data, so if you pass a fixed length string as a parameter to a VB/ISAM function, the results are unpredictable and may result in a system fault of some kind. On the other hand, fixed length strings are OK when used inside a Visual Basic User Defined Type’s (UDT), as data elements, and that UDT is the record structure used to read and write data. But even here we discourage the use of fixed length strings. Furthermore, VB.NET does not support passing UDT’s to OCX’s or DLL’s or using fixed length strings.
