Data types not yet in BLUE ICD
  • Support for boolean was added in NeXtMidas 2.5.0. It has not been formally added to the Blue File CCD or X-Midas; however X-Midas has reserved the 'Z' type letter for this purpose.
  • X-Midas 4.6.0+ List ('C'), Table ('H'), KVList ('K'), and XMValue ('V') data types have not been formally added to the Blue File CCD or NeXtMidas.
X-Midas Users Take Note:
Use of A: is discouraged in NeXtMidas, S: should be used in place of it. The presence of A: is maintained for the benefit of X-Midas users, but may be deprecated in the future.
Don't Make This Mistake:
There are several key differences between ASCII (A:) values and String (S:) values:
  • ASCII values store 7-bit ASCII characters, Strings can store Unicode characters.
  • ASCII values are Fortran strings (trailing space is discarded), Strings can have trailing white space.
  • ASCII values are typically allocated in 8-byte blocks similar to the usage of the ASCII type in a Blue File (e.g. the XA value "ABC" takes up 80 bytes, "ABC" followed by 77 spaces that get ignored), Strings use only the space required.
  • ASCII values are treated as unquoted and can lose case sensitivity within a table in situations that a normal String would not. (While this is not ideal, it matches legacy behavior.)