Forgive me if I'm missing something but to me it seems the issue is basic. You guys are forgetting the separators. Between records it's a return and between fields it's a tab.
DB_SQLString:= "SELECT [ans1], [ans2], [ans3], [ans4] FROM [Table] WHERE [recordnumber]=" ^ MyRecNum
DB_Data := ODBCExecute(handle, DB_SQLString)
ResultLine = GetLine(DB_Data, 1) -- get first line (probably not necessary because there's only one
Ans1 = GetLine(ResultLine, 1, 1, tab) -- get field 1
Ans2 = GetLine(ResultLine, 2, 2, tab) -- get field 2
Ans3 = GetLine(ResultLine, 3, 3, tab) -- get field 3
Ans4 = GetLine(ResultLine, 4, 4, tab) -- get field 4
This will get the items into the places you want. To take it a bit further you look at the code and notice that they're identical except for the number used for the Ans and the field. A common practice in this case is to set up a loop with a control variable that executes the same code over and over. Our problem is that we have four different variables and we can't cycle through the names to assign values. A "List" type variable is the best idea. We'll create a list type called Ans
Ans = [] -- empty list
Repeat with i := 1 to 4
Ans[i] = GetLine(ResultLine, i, i, tab) -- get a single item into the spot in the list
End Repeat
i is the control variable and it increments by one each repeat of the loop. So it's 1 the first time and it does GetLine(ResultLine, 1, 1, tab) and puts that in Ans[1]. On the second loop it does GetLine(ResultLine, 2, 2, tab) and puts it into spot 2. So anywhere in your code where you're using Ans1 you could use Ans[1] instead. If you don't want to keep using ans1, 2, 3, and 4 you can use the first example without the loop and just assign the four items one on each line.
Let's say just for argument's sake you don't want to use a list and you do want to use the four variables and a loop to load them. You might want to do that because you don't know in advance if you're going to have 4, 2, or 6 answers. I mentioned up above that we can't just cycle through the names. Actually we can, but it involves some tricky code. The EvalAssign function takes a piece of text and executes it as if it were programming code. Here is the example of the loop with i as the control variable again but this time it uses EvalAssign to build the variable name Ans1, Ans2, Ans3, and Ans4 on the fly.
RepeatWith i := 1 to 4
EvalAssign("Ans"^i^" = GetLine(ResultLine, "^i^", "^i^", tab)")
End Repeat
This is what we used to use before lists were made. This is a rather trivial example. In order to make it mroe real-world we'd also control the limit of 1 to 4 with some other variable to indicate how many distracters are being loaded.
HTH,
Mike
