PDQ: Case insensitive key lookup in LF and/or PF?

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks:

I've got a PDQ (Potentially Dumb Question, a TLA I just made up) about
database key access.

We have a need to create key in a file that contains upper & lower case
data ... but when we chain to the file, we want the key to be case
insensitive.  Also, this chain needs to be done in multiple CCSID's
(including DBCS).

Originally we were thinking of creating a logical file with a renamed
field & TRNTBL(QSYSTRNTBL) attribute, and making that field the key.
But it occurred to us that the QSYSTRNTBL may not be CCSID aware and, in
order to access all the fields in the file, we have to add each
individual field to the logical.

I was also thinking about giving the key field in the logical file an
alternate collating sequence table, where the table has the hex values
for the upper case letters in the lower case character positions ... but
that would not be CCSID aware.

Our only other idea is to put a duplicate field in the file ... one
field would contain the data in all caps, and would be the key, the
other field would contain the mixed case value for display purposes.
Currently this our best alternative ... and isn't that hard to
implement, because all access to this file is done through a service
program.

Any suggestions on a better way to approach this?

Thanks!

david