Restrictions on Pictures for Field Adjustment

You can enable an option that either right-justifies or left-justifies the contents of a field upon field exit. In order for field adjustment to occur, the field picture must (1) be pure, that is, consisting of picture control characters that allow the same type of character entries and (2) contain no protected characters. This means that the picture:

• nCannot contain mixtures of alphabetic (X, A, Z, *, !) and numeric picture control characters (U, 9, #, @).
  
  
• nCannot contain mixtures of Xs, As, and Zs. The picture control characters ! and *, which convert letters to uppercase or lowercase, will not destroy the purity of either a string of Xs, Zs, or As.
  
  
• nCannot contain mixtures of Us, 9s, and #s.
  
  
• nCannot contain protected characters, including a hard decimal separator or "E".

Note that the default for numeric fields is for right adjustment of field contents upon exit. You will have to observe these restrictions for numeric fields if you want right adjustment to occur. See Chapter 9, "Data Field Processing Options," for more information on field options.