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I try to avoid getting into things that either are very dangerous, or the odds of success very low.
But if I was required to tackle this, here is how I would go about it.


1. Remind co-workers of the degree to which BPCS files intricately intertwined so this behavior is not for people not intimately familiar with the whole infrastructure.
2. Suggest management have tech support review my plan of action to catch any nuances I missed.
3. Go for it.


Data files in the PC world are rather alien compared to in the 400 world.
variable vs. fixed field and file lengths
ASCII vs. EBCIDIC
translating all that has been made possible by native stuff with the 400, but it can be a bit geeky to operate, so there is a vast universe of shareware to make the process go more smoothly.


The difficulty is not in the translation of the data, but in integrating it with BPCS or whatever is your 400 application.

There can be risk that the data from a different platform does not adhere to the rules of 400 data.
Do you know what a decimal data error is?


However, when using 400 tools to copy data from one file to another, you can let the 400 catch the errors for you, then you abort the copy, knowing where there is bad data, work on fixing it, then try again, until you can go all the way, with data now known to be clean. If you take option to ignore errors, then you are asking for trouble down the road when you got invalid data interjected into your files.

The 400 comes with a bunch of capabilities ... in Client Access you can specify name of file to upload or download to where ... for safety it is best to identify some target other than the ultimate destination, because you not want to mess up your 400 software packages with data not in sync with external file rules.

Now once you have some data uploaded such as cut & paste from Internet, or Client Access, or some shareware package to make the process simple, there are some IBM 400 copy functions where you can copy from one 400 object to another ... ideally the field names should be same in both copies ... so suppose you have a file in BPCS and you have access to the source code, you can create another file in another library that has the same names of the fields as the BPCS file.

So now this look-alike file in the other library is populated by stuff that came from outside of BPCS, and perhaps the file might have some fields that are not up to snuff with respect to clean content, so you need some program to validate and fix content, clean up what you got, then use the IBM copy function to add those records to the real BPCS file.

Now in all probability there is now stuff in the file you added to that the other BPCS files do not know about, so now run some of the reorg functions on menu SYS / 23 to get the OTHER BPCS files in sync with the one you just messed with.

Better go thru the whole process in the test environment a few times to make sure you caught all the nuances.

Now all that is when the data can go into a single BPCS file When there are multiple BPCS files to be populated, using rules like one header matching several details and various control fields being some default if not already valid content in various control files, you really need some 400 software to organize which population is to go where, using some 3rd party package best suited to that function ... I love FILE TRACK for that purpose. It can also do the bad data cleanup for you.

If you plan to do this on a regular basis, then perhaps you ought to get a software package that helps the whole process go more smoothly, such as FOXTROT in which you get a script of what the end user might do at a BPCS inquiry screen, and where that person gets the data in the PC Internet world, and it emulates the human cut and paste from elsewhere into BPCS, with ability to edit the script, so when you all done, a massive file of stuff outside of the 400 has been integrated into BPCS, without modifying BPCS software or file structure, and everything is in sync, and several clerical jobs have been eliminated, perhaps including yours.
:
Hi Al Macintyre
Thanks for the information, but you never really specified how you do it
yourself. I know its extremely dangerous. How do you do it?

Kind Regards
Jet

-----Original Message-----
From: Alister Wm Macintyre

Warning ... this can be VERY DANGEROUS if you not know EXACTLY what you
doing ... not with the data transfer between PC and 400, but with the BPCS
files.  The data structure assumes that many files will be in
synchronization with each other and with the external file layout.  If you
tamper with that, without going through the regular program structure, you
can cause all of BPCS to crash.

We do BPCS data to XL all the time, but I consider the reverse direction to
be so suicidal that I keep it a secret from most of my co-workers.
:
>Is it possible to import data from excell/access via BPCS (Ver 6.0) Windows
>client?
>If so how do you go about it?
>Regards
>Jet

-
Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac



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