Sorting

Folks,

I am currently working in a shop that has a lot of older code. The code was run through some kind of utility to make it RPG IV compliant, sort of, this was done before my time. There are still large numbers of programs that have internally defined files, and so on. The other thing that is used very heavily is FMTDTA. One of the reasons is that we do a lot of selecting of data. As an example, our item number is made up of 5 2-digit codes. Each of these 5 codes is used to select the data a user wants to see on screens and reports. Depending on what they want, all five could be used or only one or any combination of. The data is then sorted into the proper order. The source specs for FMTDTA are generated on the fly. FMTDTA seems to do this well.

I've read through a number of entries in the forum archive that discussed open query, SQL, etc. These options, from what was written, either don't seem to be able to handle this very well, or are not really in favor any more then FMTDTA is. I looked briefly at using SQL with the RUNSQLSTM command, but don't seem to see any way to use the order by clause (perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I always get an error that it is not a valid tag). I'm concerned with FMTDTA, one of these days IBM may just neglect to include it as an option. I'm looking for ideas for replacing it with something else.

Thanks,

Kelley