Re: Sorting A Table

[Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Badly phrased question. See:
	http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/faqs/smart-questions.html

More information follows:

On 06/06/2008, at 7:22 AM, Robert Munday wrote:

> I need to sort a table by one of its elements which should be easy  
> enough.  There are no experienced COBOL programmers in this shop  
> and my only book example is non-iSeries.  SEU is hanging up on my  
> sort statement.
>
> Here is what I have:
>
> 01  SL415-CB-Work-Table.
>     04  CB-Table-Ctr              Pic 99 Value Zero.
>     04  CB-Work-Table-Entry
>             Occurs 50
>             Ascending Key Is CB-Past-Due
>             Indexed By CB-Index.
>         06  CB-Past-Due           Pic X(3).
>         06  CB-SSN                Pic X(9).
>         06  CB-Ln-Num             Pic XX.
>         06  CB-Account-Status     Pic XX.
>
> The editor chokes on this:
>
> Sort CB-Work-Table-Entry On Ascending Key CB-Index.

"chokes"? Such a brilliant technical description of the problem. How  
do you expect an answer when you haven't described the problem? I  
presume you mean SEU complains about the syntax. Perhaps: LNC1447 -  
Statement incomplete; last valid item found before '.'. Statement  
ignored.

From COBOL Language Refeerence:

"SORT Statement
The SORT statement accepts records from one or more files, sorts them  
according
to the specified key(s), and makes the sorted records available  
either through an
OUTPUT PROCEDURE or in an output file."

Does this description fit with what you are trying to do?

> What to do?  I'd buy an iSeries COBOL book

Why buy one? You've got access to perfectly good reference material  
in the COBOL Programmer's Guide and COBOL Language Reference both  
freely down-loadable from the Information Centre.

> but I'm outahere at the end of the month.  I could also do this in  
> SQL if I knew how.


Presuming you can sort the incoming data before it reaches working  
storage then the Database Programming manual will show you how to use  
embedded SQL in COBOL.

Otherwise you could use the Sort APIs. See the API section of the  
Information Centre. There is also an article on System i Network  
about using the Sort APIs in COBOL.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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