Re: Declaring datastructure for variable file..

"RPG400-L" <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 07/01/2019
02:26:16 PM:

I'm creating procedure where I want to pass the file name to the
procedure. So my file declaration in the procedure is...
dcl-f infile disk usropn extfile(pFileIn);

Now when I want to read the file as it's in a procedure I must use a

data

structure. How do I define the data structure as the file is unknown at
compile time. I'm thing something like...

dcl-ds inFileDs extname(pFileIn) end-ds;
But it gives me
RNF3523: External description INFILEDATA for data structure is not

found;

data structure is ignored.
RNF3608: The parameter for the EXTNAME or EXTFLD keyword must be a
character literal or constant.

How should I be defining this?

If you really want to use "standard" RPG for this type of access
then you would have to create an open data structure (i.e., with no
subfields) and parse it out yourself using %substr. But then you would
have to know the file layout ahead of time, too -- or use an API to get
the equivalent of DSPFFD. Alternatively, SQL has DESCRIPTORS to get the
column definitions.


Sincerely,

Dave Clark