Re: Need help about an OCL

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles,

    HSORTA    27A        3        N
> I asked to a more experimented programmer at the office and he said that
> it's the first time he sees this kind of syntax in a SORTA...
>
> Can someone help me?


The H means it is a header line to #GSORT.  The SORTA means it is a record
address sort.  That is, the output file is a list of RRN's, not the actual
data itself.  Each RRN is a 3 byte binary value.  The 27 means there is a
maximum of 27 bytes used for collating comparisons, and the A means they
should be in ascending order.  The 3 means the output file record length is
3 (the binary RRNs), and the N means the sort fileds should not be placed in
the output record.

Normally, when SORTA is used, the following program will be using the cycle
with the sort input file listed as a primary or secondary, but with the
F-spec option to process the file via a record address file.  Then there is
a second F-spec entry for the SORTA output file, which supplies the sequence
of the RRNs to be processed.

In S/3x days, those were 3-byte binary values.  In RPG ILE, it uses 4-byte
RRNs instead to avoid overflow on larger databases.

SORTA was used to reduce the amount of DASD consumed for temporary sorted
output.

Doug