Re: ILE, Activation groups, and files staying open.

At my shop, somebody wrote a trigger program and then attached it to the most-used file in the system.

That file is also used by the most-used program. It runs standalone and also is called by maybe up to hundreds of other programs. Quite a "legacy".

I don't know what activation group attribute he used but it created havoc for a few minutes. (I suspect *CALLER). Till somebody hit an emergency virtual) STOP button.

I did a trigger program shortly afterward and they teamed me up with two guys to look over my code and monitor the action.

I did the trigger-pair thing from a recent article. One "driver" that does nothing but pass the parms through to the "workhorse" program. That way you can replace the "workhorse" without disturbing the file or its attached trigger file directly.

BUT before I did the trigger program, I ran X-Analysis to get ALL the programs that did ANY updates/deletes/inserts to the file, and considered their own activation groups. In this case (and most) you have to compile the trigger program with *CALLER, or get your performance killed and mutilated.

I also "walked the upstack" from those programs to check the activation group. It looked like the programs had been called without regard for consideration for the ACTGRP issues. After that havoc, though, they're paying more attention. Some of those "upstack" programs I had to convert from OPM RPG3 code. Glad to do it!

--Alan Cassidy