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Associative Arrays in Siebel eScript

Siebel eScript supports associative arrays, where the array index can be a string instead of a number. This capability is useful when you want to associate values with specific names. For example you may want to have a month's array where the elements are the names of the months and the values are the number of days in the month.

To access items in an associative array, you use a string as an index. For example:

array_name["color"] = "red";
array_name["size"] = 15;

An advantage of associative arrays is that they are the only arrays that can be used with the for...in statement. This statement loops through every element in an associative array or object, regardless of how many or how few elements it may contain. For more information, see for...in Statement.

The following example creates an associative array of months and days, and totals the number of days.

// open file
var fp = Clib.fopen("c:\\months.log", "at");

// populate associative array
var months = new Array();
months["November"] = 30;
months["December"] = 31;
months["January"] = 31;
months["February"] = 28;

// iterate through array items
var x;
var total = 0;
for (x in months)
   {
    // write array items name and value to file
    Clib.fputs(x + " = " + months[x] + "\n",fp);
    // Add this month's value to the total
    total = total + months[x];
   }
Clib.fputs ("Total = " + total + "\n",fp);

//close file
Clib.fclose(fp);

The output of this example is:

November = 30
December = 31
January = 31
February = 28
Total = 120