Hi Kelley,
You'll probably get a lot of different opinions on this. A couple of things
came to mind as I read your post.
1. FMTDTA works really well. It's one of those "tools" that was made to
function very well right out of the box (in my experience anyway), kind of
like a hammer. It's a very simple design but using it you can build the most
complex and beautiful home. My point being that if it works for you now, why
borrow trouble and take the chance on introducing new problems into your
code that dumping FMTDTA in favor of some other query-tool would inevitably
cause.
2. FMTDTA may eventually be dropped by IBM, although I doubt it would be
anytime in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, as stated above, if it
works now, why not just leave it alone? If they do drop support on it, it
won't be overnight and you should have plenty of time then to find an
alternative you would like better. When IBM dropped support for Office
Vision/400, it took them something like 5 years to actually remove it from
OS/400 and even then, if you still have access to the old LPP, you can still
run it on current systems.
So, my opinion would be to leave it alone for now. If you are in a typical
iSeries shop, I'm sure there are probably a thousand other projects that
have a more pressing deadline.
HTH
Shannon O'Donnell
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[
mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kelley Shaddrick
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 5:26 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 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
midrange.com
