Re: transfer of s36(externally describe) -- MIDRANGE-L

>  keith.nolan@dubport.ccs.ie wrote:
>  > 
>  > How do we externally describe a system36 file??  
>  > Probably a stupid question I know.....

>  From:    mboceanside@worldnet.att.net (Pat Barber)
>   The S/36 files are easy to convert IF you have a "complete" layout:

From Al Macintyre
but if you have thousands of files with contents that would be decimal data 
errors under OS/400 rules, it can be extremely time consuming.  When we 
converted in 1998 from S/36 we got NCS Pro for approx $1600.00 ... they have 
competitors.

I do not remember the whole process, but one thing it did for us was cross 
index which RPG programs allegedly accessed which of our files & we could add 
to that index ... apparently it used the OCL technique of
LOAD THIS PROGRAM
FILE NAME THIS THAT & THE OTHER
RUN THE SUCKER
but we had a lot of
FILE NAME LIST
LOAD THIS THAT & THE OTHER PROGRAM AGAINST THE LIST
which it did not catch

So now for any given file, we reviewed the RPG code to see which one was 
closest to a complete picture & this led to generating DDS specifications 
interactively ... a lot of our S/36 internal definitions were illegal under 
OS/400 rules, such as overlapping sub-field definitions, so it caught these & 
forced us to decide how to redefine those fields.  

After the interactive sessions that caught differences in SSP practices & 
OS/400 rules, it generated compilation of the DDS and software to copy the 
S/36 file into the new external structure, making all the corrections in 
stuff that would lead to decimal data errors, due to OS/400 being more 
restrictive than SSP.

We modified these programs to drop records soft coded for deletion at that 
point, and we also had an algorithm associated with very ancient historical 
records that we would have soft deleted had we had the time to do so.  

We had been on BPCS/36 with a complete set of S/36 "dot files" (not supported 
on OS/400) because BPCS/36 MRP did not support the notion that an enterprise 
might have far flung operations whose MRPs should be kept separate, but 
BPCS/400 did support multiple facilities, so now we were combining 4 data 
bases into one environment, which meant that some data was to be copied 
almost as is, just populated with facility identification, while other data 
was to be summed, with grand total of 4 data bases combined in one 
consolidated record.

For this part of the task we used File Track which we got for about $1600.00 
& I have not seen anything advertised in competition with what this outfit 
does, like I have for NCS Pro.  Here's the web site for info on File Track.

http://www.outlookcomputing.com

With File Track you could think of data in different files as being like a 
jigsaw puzzle that you want to rearrange, in which some of the restructuring 
is conditional with full access to all RPG data manipulation logic, and we 
did do some restructuring due to how we wanted to incorporate modifications 
into new fields now available to us.

The core process was that NCS PRO put our 4 data bases of S/36 data into 1 
external layout per file with 4 members, one for each data base, then File 
Track combined that into the final environment.

These 2 products combined shaved many months off of the time to get the job 
done without using them, made it practical to have a Mother of all CL to 
automate the whole conversion process, run a multitude of Conference Room 
Pilots, with the end users making improvements in their statements of what 
they needed, leading to refinements of what we had in File Track.

We could not have figured this out without the help of ERP consultants.

I am not real clever with coining phrases but I think this is like a fool has 
himself for a lawyer ... a fool does this kind of conversion for the first 
time with the expert being himself.

Al Macintyre
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