Re: File transaction date

David, I'm sure your design made perfect sense at the time, so don't consider this as a critique, but I would like to point out the elephant in the room here: binding modules by copy is a technique that can really hurt you.

Database references and stale business logic are just two reasons why I've never like bind by copy. Either stay with dynamic program calls, or bind your modules into a service program. The half-way point of binding by copy should probably be avoided wherever possible.

Don't get me wrong - I used bind by copy quite a bit when it first became available. It's just that as my understanding of ILE progressed I found it harder to justify. The only use I see for it today is for security modules because it closes the security hole of having your own version of the security program.

Okay, that's the theoretical point. On to the practical.

As far as the time issue, here's a possibility: do you have room for two copies of your program library, David? If so, could you create a dummy library with an empty copy of the new file and all your programs already compiled against that new file? Then, your window would only need to be long enough to CHGPF the file and then copy all the programs from the new library to the production library. That has to be faster than recompiling everything. Just a thought.

Joe

Hi,

I'm currently adding a date field to an old PF which will hold the date that a transaction gets modified. The file has 3 or 4 mentions in different RPG modules that get bound by copy to almost everything. This results in having to recompile pratically the whole system. The job that migrates the file takes about 2.5 hours to run and I need to plan it in advance so noone is using the file when ir runs. In other words, it's a headache.

I don't know much about journals/receivers as they aren't used here. But aren't they designed for this kind of information? I'm also thinking of the rollback feature that they permit. I've never used that either. What kind of preparations do we need to think about to be able to switch to this kind of file management?