Re: Activation Group

hi Jerry,

I wrote it so that (a) it is in its own activation group, and (b)
never sets on Last Record. The idea being that, after the first
invocation, it would still be available to the job without having to
reload it.

Yes, everything you've said is correct. In fact, this is the way that I've always written my trigger programs, because not only does it keep the program in memory, but if I ever really want to end the trigger, I can do so by reclaiming the activation group.

However -- a while back, Birgitta told me that this is a bad practice.

Her reasoning is that commitment control is scoped to the activation group. So if you have commitment control active and you write to a file that's in a different activation group, then whatever that trigger does is not covered by the commitment control, thus screwing up the "all these things are part of one transaction" nature of commitment control.

By contrast, if you use ACTGRP(*CALLER), the trigger will be under the same commitment control definition as the program that fired it, which is preferred.