RE: Midrange Knowledge test

Our sales history file stores data by customer, major commodity, and sub
commodity. Our sales plan is by customer and major commodity, and our
delivery history file is by customer only. We have a large number of sales
analysis reports that combine these three files, using the RPG cycle with
level breaks and matching records. I can imagine writing those reports in
some other language -- no, thank you very much. The cycle is great for that.

However, RPG didn't save that many lines of code (just many hours of
debugging). The reason is that all of the reports look very similar, they
just have different selection and sorting before they are produced. So the
RPG-cycle logic is encapsulated in a small number of pieces of code, which
are /COPY-ed into each of the report programs. And these pieces of code have
had essentially no changes since they were written in 1995, even though new
reports using them have been written since then.

PC2

-----Original Message-----
From: Booth Martin [mailto:Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: December 31, 2003 09:57
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Midrange Knowledge test


Here's the obvious questions for you:

Now that you've used the cycle are you prepared to embrace its power and
simplicity?  Was it a good experience for you? Have you used Level breaks
and Matching records yet?  How many loops and lines of code do you guess it
eliminated for you?