RE: Decimal data errors

From: James H H Lampert

"Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Will FIXNBR(*ZONED) be sufficient?  Since you don't care
about those fields, whatever the runtime does will be fine
with you as long as it doesn't halt processing.

Just because we don't care about the fields doesn't mean
that other programs wouldn't care if we corrupted their
nonstandard content. Which we would presumably do, every
time we updated an affected record.

I seem to have left out the part that the program in
question is one that propagates data from our application
back to theirs.

Uh, yeah.  I'm pretty sure most of the answers assumed you were only reading
the data.  I know mine was <grin>.

If it's updating you need to do, you have a couple of options.  One is to
only update those fields you need to update.  RPG lets you do that using the
%fields BIF on the UPDATE.  The other option is to internally describe the
file.  That's actually pretty straightforward:

1. Internally describe the file with the appropriate length.
2. Create an externally described data structure (EDS) using the "proper"
layout.
3. Read into the EDS
4. Move your data into the EDS fields
5. Write from the EDS

Should work like a charm.  I don't THINK the compiler does any checking on
fields in a data structure when you read.  (If it does, you need to create a
BASED work data structure LIKE (not LIKEDS) the extds, point it to the
address of the extds, and read and write to/from the work DS.)

Joe