In addition to frames, your application can include procedures. A procedure is a set of command statements that are called by name from an application to perform calculations or processing.

Procedures encapsulate operations that you want to use in an application, but which are not provided by Ingres tools, such as Query-By-Forms (QBF). You must write procedures in 4GL, 3GL, or SQL.

After you write a procedure, you can call it from a frame or another procedure. When called, a procedure executes sets of statements and returns data to the calling frame.

For more information on creating procedures with ABF, see Building Applications on page 11. For more information about creating procedures with Vision, see Defining Frames without Visual Queries on page 95.