Re: From PC to AS400 data transfer

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

>  I have been charged with finding an 'elegant' method for transferring
>  information from Excel spreadsheets to the 400.  In this case 'elegant'
>  means "without a lot of user intervention".
>
>  I'd appreciate your input on the method(s) that you'd recommend and why.

I suspect the Excel spread sheet layout will be unpredictable & you not want
to hassle end users for specifics, so ideally you want to assign some library
to receive the data, which creates work files on the fly, like in the reverse
of we have people going to 400 spool file & getting a copy of the file in
data form & importing it to Excel spread sheets in which they name their
target file name on the fly.

This means you need some way to parse the Excel data & build corresponding
400 external definitions.  But what you need to do cannot be a new 400
requirement.  The shareware places might be worth checking out to see if
someone already has the code to do this.  I am referring to such resources as:

http://www.asc-iseries.com/opsnews.htm
www.bvstools.com
www.bytware.com/freestuff.htm
www.dbg400.net
www.easy400.ibm.it
http://www.EZDataAccess.com
www.symtrax.com
http://www.wrkdbf.com

Another alternative is http://www.seacrest.com
Desk Master is twinax access to internet resources
for example, you can have a browser fill in a form, that ends up as a 400 file
but unfortunately for you, the form is pre-defined, not open ended Excel
layout

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)