You cannot place an expression in a DEFINE FRAME statement because no values exist at compile time for ABL to format. Since you often need to put derived data in frames, you need a way to handle expressions. One solution is to create variables to hold the values. Another solution provides more flexibility: create variables with the characteristics of the expression results (data type, formatting, and label) as base fields. You can include the base fields in the frame definition and then replace the base field with any compatible expression result at runtime using the @ option of the DISPLAY statement.

Here is an example:

The previous example compiles a phone list of customer and contact names. If no contact is on file, "No Contact" appears in the report.