Re: Dams -- RPG400-L

My "Dam" for the day on V5R2 customer's machine became evident when I
attempted to use a Chain opcode to fill  DS directly. The DS referenced was
defined in the D spec with an EXTNAME and it also had a PREFIX defined.

The V5R2 documentation is *wrong*. You cannot use EXTNAME with a DS inthe result field of an externally defined file in V5R2. You _must_ useLIKEREC if you want to read into a data structure using the result field.

They discovered the problem with the documentation too late, and weren'table to fix it. They "fixed" the problem in V5R3 by changing the compilerto allow EXTNAME... but it won't work in V5R2, whether you specify *INPUTor not... you need LIKEREC in V5R2.

The other alternative is to have the fields load into the data structurewithout specifying the DS as a result field. If the DS is global, and thenames in the DS match the fieldnames from your file, they'll automaticallybe loaded into the DS.

This is slightly slower than reading into it with the result field, but Idoubt you'll notice the performance difference.

The option 14 compile resulted in level 20 error that said in essencethat the DS name could not be used in the result field. I check theWebsphere RPG ILE docs and sure enough they said that it could be donebut someone must have forgot to tell the compiler.

Yep, the documentation in V5R2 is wrong. V5R3 added the EXTNAMEcapability in order to fix the documentation.

What I think is weird is that we now have both LIKEREC and EXTNAME andthey more or less do exactly the same thing. The original idea was thatLIKEREC would be used for reading directly into a DS, and EXTNAME would beused for cloning a record format into a DS. Now we have both, and theycan both be used for either purpose. :)