OVRMSGF & Literal BPCS

from Al Macintyre BPCS 405 CD on OS/400 V4R3

I am periodically stumbling over IBM commands I did not notice before & 
reading their F1 to figure out if they could help me resolve some past 
challenge.

BPCS uses MSGF text to identify field names on screens & reports, over-riding 
the naming that is used in DDS, so that by changing this text, which SSA 
calls literals, companies can tailor how various fields are used & have what 
significance.  Since the DDS is left intact, this does not apply to how the 
field names show up in other IBM access to the external definitions, such as 
Query, DFU, SQL, RPG, etc.

SSA provides SYS708 program to supplement WRKMSGF SSAZ* & it in turn needs 
access to XRF data, but according to SSA tech support, the only way to get 
XRF to work is to make 100% of our users master security officers & I don't 
want the benefits of XRF that badly.

A past problem - my users want to have BPCS literals updated, somewhat on the 
fly without any master document preserved of what all we have changed, to 
help us when new releases from SSA replace what we have changed with a new 
bigger list of data in WRKMSGF SSAZ* with which SSA does not provide any 
source document that could be subject to PDM-54 identification of what they 
added in the new version, but that would not help with what we changed in the 
old version.

In theory, I ought to be able to learn the writing of a master program that 
applies our literal changes programmatically, then as more are wanted 
changed, just add that to the program & re-run it, so that when SSA delivers 
a BMR or release with a larger MSGF list with more added to the collection, 
we can just rerun that program ... I am not that knowledgeable yet with 400 
programming techniques to figure out how to do that.

Is there any IBM tool to compare contents of two versions of MSGF to identify 
what is different in the two lists of message files?

If we had TAATOOLS I figure that they would have such a solution.   If the 
price is within reason, this is one of several products I am tempted to buy 
out of my own wages & land on my employer's computer, ethics be damned.  I 
have done that sort of thing before, on occasion, when I felt that I could 
not do my job properly without certain tools, but could not persuade 
management of the neccessity.

I have tried printing MSGF but the list is monstrous & of course 99% of the 
content is identical.  I guess I could try to figure out how to get it to 
what *OUTFILE then compare both versions via Query/400.

I can figure out from BPCS source code how to access a particular literal or 
MSGF message number, but is there any command to read through MSGF entries 
from beginning to end - all entries, like we can read through a file without 
needing to know the index addresses of each record.

One idea I had was if I could do that, then for each hit, look up the same 
message number in the other version & compare text - if identical move on to 
the next one & only print the ones that are different.

OVRMSGF = I stumbled over this command by accident & seek clarification that 
I am interpreting it correctly.  Within DDS & RPG, various message members 
are called from SSAZ* members unqualified, so the library list applies ... 
OS/400 finds the first SSAZ whatever in our library list, which in our case 
is BPCDREL02, and takes whatever it can find there from the message # & if 
the # is not there, tough cookies.

Am I reading OVRMSGF help correctly, that not only can we over-ride the 
message file to use, but we can tell it to use TWO or more message files ... 
if message not found in first one, go to second, third & only quit when run 
out of OVRMSGF list or do find the message?

If so, then I would want SSAZ lookups to first look in our BPCDBASE library 
so as to get at the literals that my users had had changed, then secondarily 
the latest BMR version from SSA to get any literals they had added to the 
collection.

I know I could do this in CL of individual programs that the users want the 
literal changes to apply to, which is quite a lot.  Is there some BPCS 
program that actually looks up the literals, that by modifying its CL, I 
could reduce the volume of mods needed?

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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