Re: trimming trailing blanks in spooled output...

Michael

I have only a fleeting familiarity with anything on the mainframe, but maybe I 
can still respond meaningfully. Basically it seems you expect to do more work 
than you have to. You don't write directly to some spooler on the iSeries - you 
write to a file, of file type PRTF or Printer File. As has been said, this is 
basically a fixed-length record-based concept - the layout of each record is 
define in a program or in an external object. It can be up to 378 characters 
wide. Then there is a printing process that takes this output and puts it on 
the spooler for you - hence the command WRKSPLF - work with spooled files.

You are protected from lots of the details that you had to worry about on 
mainframes - iSeries does a lot for you - perhaps not always as efficiently - 
but pretty well. So things are actually a lot easier, usually, as far as I can 
tell.

HTH
Vern

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Michael Rosinger" <mrosinger@xxxxxxxxx> 

"GDS" wrote in message 
news:mailman.54.1165253253.1743.midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

In my experience this has not been a concern in the midrange world. The 
blanks are there when you display the spool file or when you copy the 
spool 
file to a database file. 

Is this a concern about the storage size of the spool file on the disk? 

All, 

I suppose my concern is for the proper use of storage and the right way to 
do things in the iSeries world. If you tell me that reports that are spooled 
have all lines as fixed length, then this is not an issue. In the VSE world, 
lines of print that are spooled are variable length. So, while writing one 
blank vs. writing 132 blanks accomplishes the same goal as far as the 
appearance of the report is concerned, it is an incredible waste of storage 
when you multiply that by tens of thousands of lines of print times hundreds 
or thousands of reports. And guess who gets called when the pint queues fill 
up? 

For now, there is no concern with the formatting of the same report that 
will be downloaded to another platform, but I will take that under 
advisement because it surely could be an issue. 

As with most things I've discovered in the iSeries world it handles these 
things well and they become non-issues. Coming from the VSE world you can 
understand my concern. 

-- 
Regards, 

Michael Rosinger 
Systems Programmer / DBA 
Computer Credit, Inc. 
640 West Fourth Street 
Winston-Salem, NC 27101 
336-761-1524 
m rosinger at cciws dot com 


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