Another important ABL construct is the temporary table (temp-table). A temp-table gives you nearly all the features of a database table, and you can use a temp-table in your procedures almost anywhere you could reference a database table. However, temp-tables are not persistent. They are not stored anywhere permanently. They are also private to your own OpenEdge® session, the data you define in them cannot be seen by any other users. You can define sets of data using temp-tables that do not correspond to tables and fields stored in your application database, which gives you great flexibility in how you use them. You can also use a temp-table to pass a whole set of data from one procedure to another, or even from one OpenEdge session to another. Together, queries and temp-tables provide much of the basis for how data is passed from one application module to another. They are essential to creating distributed applications, with data and business logic on a server machine and many independent client sessions running the user interface of the application. By the time you complete this chapter, you will understand how to use these features in your applications.
