Field (computer science)

In computer science, data that has several parts can be divided into fields. For example, a computer may represent today's date as three distinct fields: the day, the month and the year.

Programming languages usually have a record data type to represent composite data types as a series of fields. An array of boolean values can be represented as a bit field.

Relational databases arrange data as sets of database records, also called rows. Each record consists of several fields; the fields of all records form the columns.

In object-oriented programming, field (also called data member) is the data encapsulated within a class or object. In the case of a regular field (also called instance variable), for each instance of the object there is an instance variable: for example, an Employee class has a Name field and there is one distinct name per employee. A static field (also called class variable) is one variable, which is shared by all instances.

Field
A column in a table that stores the values for a single attribute.

Field precision
The number of digits that can be stored in a field in a table.

Field scale
The number of decimal places for float or double-type geodatabase table fields

Field type
The type of field can be text, numeric (float, dobule, short, long), data, blob, raster, guid.

Field length
A text field can have a length of 1 to 255 characters.

Field mapping
In geoprocessing, defining the field structure and content for an output dataset.