Re: Question on updating some OLD programs

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It isn't just clear to me how this is used, but this scenario might be 
desirable for you?

1) Create the external file description (empty) for SALES.
2) Do not use CL.
3) Change the F-specs to FSALES... usropn
4) In the *inzsr, write a small loop that displays a screen asking for 
the fiscal year (or special suffix).
5) Once a valid suffix is chosen, do a OVRDBF and then open the user's 
chosen file.
6) It wouldn't take much to have a new small program that can be called 
in the *inzsr that has a window with a dropdown box of available years 
(and other, special, suffixes) that can be chosen.  That would probably 
be used repeatedly by all of the various programs.


On 4/5/2012 2:13 PM, Victor Hunt wrote:
> 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.