Re: Question on updating some OLD programs

Since you are going through this exercise already I would like create a
single table named SALES and add a column for YEAR then put all of the
data into it. As to dealing with the compiles, simply executing the
OVRDBF & compile interactive in that job would work.



From: Victor Hunt <xlcfdp@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Date: 04/05/2012 02:11 PM
Subject: Question on updating some OLD programs
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



I do apologize in advance for asking about something most folks dealt with
years and years ago...

I have a large number of programs in our sales reporting system that were
written a very long time ago. We are in the beginning stages of upgrading
them. In most cases, these programs have program defined files. In almost
all cases, the file name is something like SALES. There isn't a file on
our
system called SALES. There are however files called SALES2012, SALES2011,
etc. The CL has an OVRDBF command to point SALES to the appropriate
SALESYYYY file for processing. Of course, this is variable as any
SALESYYYY
file going back 10 years can be selected by the user.

As part of the upgrade, we'd like to change all program defined files to
externally defined files. Unfortunately, the file SALES doesn't exist so
compiles would fail. I could change them all to SALES2012, but at some
point this file won't exist either. I can create an empty file named SALES
with the same layout and no records, but this still has it's problems
(there are many programs where the file is defined more then once, SALES1
and SALES2, for summary processing).

What is the best way to handle this situation? We are on 7.1 by the way if
it makes any difference in how we would handle this.