RE: Making a program dynamic

I don't know the details of your hard-coded processes or the spool file
information this is based on, but the answer is yes, you can.

I'll let you know what I did one time in RPG and maybe it'll give you some
ideas.

We wanted to take a group of spool files and create a physical file out of
them and archive them to CD-ROM.  I build a data base that had a few fields,
the main ones being: Line Number, Start Position, Text to Find, ID Number,
File Name.  When this program was kicked off it would start opening spool
files in a certain output queue.  This was before I even heard of Spool file
APIs, so I did a SAVSPLF to a physical file, then went through my table and
searched for the text on the line number specified until I found a match.
The first time though this program would check and make sure that all the
spool files for a certain file name were present.  If they were all present,
it would then go through the table and find the first spool file, save it to
a file, find the second spool file, save it to the end of the file, and so
on, until all the spool files for that file name were processed.  Once they
were all processed this physical file would me copied over to a PC for
archiving to CD-ROM.

You can do a lot with searching through spool files for identifying which
one you have.  If you are creative with your spool file index databases you
can put a lot of unique information inside of them to determine what to do
with each spool file with little modification of your RPG program.

I hope this gives you some ideas.

Regards,

Jim Langston

-----Original Message-----
From: Wills, Mike N. (TC) [mailto:MNWills@taylorcorp.com]

I am going to probe the great minds on this list for some ideas....

I am looking at ways to make a program more dynamic. I have a program that
will monitor outqs for spool files through a dataq and kick off a processing
program. The processing program then runs hard-coded processes based on the
spool file information. Several processes could be the same or similar, but
they could also be very different. So every time I need to add another spool
file, I need to modify this program, recompile and test it. I would like to
try and make this program more dynamic to eliminate this need. Can this be
done either via RPG or Java?

What this processing program does is set up the information I need to create
the file name and path from the job and spool file information in the dataq
for me to make different files that are either located on the IFS or an FTP
server. I would prefer a RPG solution but would also do this in Java.

Thanks for any help,

Mike