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Re: enumeration values

Dear John,

I'm not sure that the problem is restricted only to DDL1 dictionaries, it looks like the same problem would exist with a DDL2 dictionary also.

It seems to me that this could be resolved relatively simply by the addition of an extra item added to the DDL to indicate whether the given enumeration choices can be combined in *any order*.  Obviously for this to be the case it should only apply to one character codes.  It should be easy for a validator to then loop through every character in the value to be validated, and check that each character is a valid choice.  It should also check that each code is used only once.

Such a DDL item could be something such as _enumeration_combine or _enumeration_permute (or DDL2 equivalent), which itself has permitted values of 'yes' and 'no' (the default).  Adding an extra item like this shouldn't break, or change the behaviour of, older validators, whilst allowing up to date validators to validate these concatenated values correctly.

I think you are probably correct regarding the case sensitivity issue - it would probably be best to (or at least have an option to) treat case sensitive mismatches as warnings instead of errors.

Thanks,

Richard
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