These topics describe the following data maintenance operations:

• Selecting records.
• Collecting transaction values.
• Manipulating stacks and fields.
• Controlling the flow of a procedure.
• Writing transactions.
• Issuing the procedure.

Each step is divided into three parts:

• A Goal that briefly states what you want to accomplish in this part of the procedure.
• Methods that you can use to achieve your goal. This part provides you with task-oriented instructions for using Maintain. If you are in a hurry to build the application, you can skim or skip this section and move on to the Solution section.
• A Solution that implements a method and shows the resulting code used to build the sample application. At each step in building the procedure, the code developed so far appears in a box, and the commands added during that step appear in bold.

The following topics are not intended to provide the complete syntax or explanations of Maintain commands, functions, and variables. For a complete reference see Language Rules Reference; Command Reference; Expressions Reference, and Using Functions.

In these topics and in Tutorial: Painting a Procedure, the instruction Try it now: indicates an instruction for you to type text, select from a dialog box, or press a key.