Re: File keyed on a date field: the read doesn't actually get anything! What am I doing wrong?

On 1/7/26 2:47 PM, Brian Parkins wrote:

To reaffirm Raul's advice, you could have tweaked your program slightly to READ into a Data Structure as follows:
. . .
     D SLSMONTHSDS     DS                  LIKEREC(SLSMONTHR)
. . .
     C                   READ      SLSMONTHS     SLSMONTHSDS

- then you would have been able to track all of the data in debug. Just a thought for the future.

Actually, if Raul hadn't pointed out that scatter-gather doesn't fill fields that aren't referenced, I'd have done exactly what you suggested, since I knew scatter-gather wasn't working, and just didn't remember why.

Again, thank you to all who responded. It still took me an hour longer than expected to figure out how to best use the data from the lookup file for what the customer wanted, but at least I was no longer on the verge of screaming obscenities within earshot of the neighbors. And it turns out that my test program was useful in forcing the "border cases" under controlled conditions, to work out the logic.

--
JHHL