RE: Question about opening and closing files

You can play around with all kind of scenarios, but you should do yourself a favor and do not have the "Trigger" program open any files. The trigger program will receive the entire before and after fields of the file being triggered along with what kind of an event it was. Have your trigger program analyze the event and call another program to handle that event. That way, you'll never have to recompile your trigger program unless you literally change the file's physical format.

The biggest problem with a trigger is it's usually over a file that every uses a lot. To recompile the trigger program you have to un-trigger the file. To remove the trigger you have to have everyone out of it and that means lost production time. If, however, the trigger program does nothing more than direct traffic, you can make all the changes you want to the traffic programs without having to un-trigger the file.

We learned this one the hard way. We have about a dozen files triggered. Every trigger program we have is, with the exception of the names, exactly the same. Determine if it's a 1, 2 or a 3 (Add, Delete or Update) and call the appropriate program to handle it.