Fielded Buffer Indexes

When a fielded buffer has many fields, access is expedited in FML by the use of an internal index. The user is normally unaware of the existence of this index.

Fielded buffer indexes do, however, take up space in memory and on disk. When you store a fielded buffer on disk, or transmit a fielded buffer between processes or between computers, you can save disk space and/or transmittal time by first discarding the index.

The Funindex() function enables you to discard the index. When the fielded buffer is read from disk (or received from a sending process), the index can be explicitly reconstructed with the Findex() function.

Note that these space savings do not apply to memory. The Funindex() function does not recover in-core memory used by the index of a fielded buffer.