Another wheel invented or creating memo columns in cursors

In the SQL SELECT placed below, the last column is populated with the output from a function. Occasionally the length of the output exceeds 255 characters, which requires the column to be of the Memo data type.

SELECT;
product_id,;
cat.category_id,;
category_name,;
GetCategoryFullpath(product_id, cat.category_id);
FROM category cat;
INNER JOIN product_to_category ptc ON ptc.category_id = cat.category_id

Using PADR() for extending GetCategoryFullpath return beyond 255 characters results in "String is too long to fit" error. Same happens when PADR() is applied directly in the SQL SELECT.

In VFP8 this obstacle seems to be impassable (or "unpassable" using modern English). VFP9 added CAST() function that solves the task.


SELECT;
product_id,;
cat.category_id,;
category_name,;
CAST(GetCategoryFullpath(product_id, cat.category_id) as M) as category_fullpath;
FROM category cat;
INNER JOIN product_to_category ptc ON ptc.category_id = cat.category_id


Thanks to Naomi and Sergey on UniversalThread pointing me to the CAST(), I stopped short from wasting more time on reinventing the wheel.