A Record object represents a logical record of a file and consists of a record buffer which contains the actual data record and the separately administered length of the data within the record buffer.
The Record class provides methods to access the data in the record buffer and their length, and to set or modify these. No methods are provided for accessing numerical data fields; users can implement these themselves on the basis of the methods provided.
A Record object is typically used to store or transfer the data of the record-by-record or pageby-page access operations to files. It is serializable and can therefore be used for Remote Method Interfaces (RMI). The Cloneable interface is also implemented.
Positions within a record are counted starting with position 0 (the first data byte of a record thus has position 0 and so on). A logical data record of a file contains only the user data, while the data record stored physically in the file can contain additional meta information (for example record length). Consequently the numbering of record positions for example at the DMS macro interfaces of BS2000 (these supply the physical record) can differ from that at the JRIO interfaces (these supply the logical record).