Re: accessing QS3F data by utilities and 4GLs - where do they see thefield layout ?

Having done this sort of thing in the past, I have to warn that it's not as easy as it looks. RPG II programs in particular are notorious for subfields, superfields, field redefinitions and so on. For example, one RPG II member might define a whole date, while another might define only the year. One program might show a field as zoned numeric while another shows it as alpha. And in many installations, each program only defines the fields it cares about, so you have to run through all the programs to find all the field definitions.

Yes, it's doable, but it's not exactly simple. I spent several years one summer writing a tool to do just that: convert an internally described S/36 accounting system to S/38 externally described files.

Joe

If you think about it, most of what you need to externally define your files is in the "I" specs. Record name, field name, field type, field length can be derived from starting and ending positions, and decimals.

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/gl100.txt


It would be pretty easy to write a program to harvest "I" specs from RPG II source members and import them into a data dictionary. Then you could then generate DDS or SQL DDL. You'd still need to enter column headings and any other meta data you'd want.



----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Franz<jfranz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: RPG programming on the IBM i / System i<rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc:
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: accessing QS3F data by utilities and 4GLs - where do they see thefield layout ?

there are several s36 to native conversion tools that work with RPGII F&I.
Google "s36 to native conversion" for a list. From there you have native dds
files
accessible from sql tools (have to work around multi record format
and multi member files). And there are services that do this for a fee.
Jim Franz