By the way, I remember either John Sears or Jim Sloan (ex IBM'ers) stating
that if done properly, FMTDTA works just as well if not better than OPNQRYF.
The guys in the lab ought to know. :-))
Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 708-425-4198
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[
mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Kelley Shaddrick
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 5:26 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Sorting
Folks,
I am currently working in a shop that has a lot of older code. The code was
run through some kind of utility to make it RPG IV compliant, sort of, this
was done before my time. There are still large numbers of programs that have
internally defined files, and so on. The other thing that is used very
heavily is FMTDTA. One of the reasons is that we do a lot of selecting of
data. As an example, our item number is made up of 5 2-digit codes. Each of
these 5 codes is used to select the data a user wants to see on screens and
reports. Depending on what they want, all five could be used or only one or
any combination of. The data is then sorted into the proper order. The
source specs for FMTDTA are generated on the fly. FMTDTA seems to do this
well.
I've read through a number of entries in the forum archive that discussed
open query, SQL, etc. These options, from what was written, either don't
seem to be able to handle this very well, or are not really in favor any
more then FMTDTA is. I looked briefly at using SQL with the RUNSQLSTM
command, but don't seem to see any way to use the order by clause (perhaps
I'm doing something wrong, but I always get an error that it is not a valid
tag). I'm concerned with FMTDTA, one of these days IBM may just neglect to
include it as an option. I'm looking for ideas for replacing it with
something else.
Thanks,
Kelley
midrange.com
