Re: ALCOBJ of a file with no members

[steven.ryan@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Antonio

If I understand your requirement correctly, the only time this job will
have members is while this job is running.  You don't want this job
affected by data from other jobs, and you don't want data from this job
affecting other jobs.  If this is so, there are a couple of different ways
you can handle things.

The first is to use CRTDUPOBJ to create a copy of the file in QTEMP.  This
is often the preferred way of stopping data from one job affecting another,
because if you put members into the 'live' version of the file, and then
your program abnormally ends before it removes the unwanted members, these
members can affect the next job to use that file.  If you use QTEMP, this
problem is avoided, and there is no need to use ALCOBJ at all.

The second option is to have a member (or members) that you clear each time
you run the job.  You can still use ALCOBJ to keep one job accessing the
file at a time.  One consideration with this approach is whether your
members have specific names that are determined at run time (such as
department number or date/time).  If threy do, then you could have a dummy
member to allow your ALCOBJ loack, and then create/remove whatever members
you like.


<Snip>
Today I wrote a simple CL program that needs to take *EXCL control of a
file. When this work starts, the job should have NO members at all, and
the job will go adding some members. At the end of the job, all members
will be removed (normal end of work).
When allocating (ALCOBJ) an object of type *FILE, you can specify no
member in the command (then Allocate is done on the whole object) or you
can also specify the member you want to specifically allocate. In this
case you get a *SHRRD on the file and a *EXCL on the Members data.
So far, so good.
But what happens if the file has no members at all?
<End Snip>