Re: Sorting a program described file

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I follow all of that, Paul.  The piece I am missing is that I want to 
have a logical file, and use that logical as an externally defined file 
in my RPG program.  I am not wanting to sort on the 4-column, packed, 
7/2 field, but I do want to get the right value for the field.  How does 
the RPG program know that the field is a packed numeric and not a 4-char 
field?  Where do I define that?

PaulMmn wrote:
> A packed field can -only- have an odd-number of digits!  Because you 
> have 1/2 byte for the sign, either count the bytes by odd numbers 
> (1-3-5-7) until you've counted up to the number of bytes, or 
> calculate--  ((#ofBytes * 2) - 1).  Even if you describe the field 
> with even numbers, you still get an extra half-byte once the data's 
> stored on disk.
>
> As far as sorting...  it doesn't matter if you have a character, 
> packed, or binary field--  sorting on the field still comes out in 
> the right sequence.
>
> --Paul E Musselman
> PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
> At 11:49 AM -0600 12/24/08, Troy Foster wrote:
>   
> >    or 6,2
> >
> >    On 12/24/2008 11:46 AM, Booth Martin wrote:
> >
> >  I went back and looked at my source.   sheeeshhh...  I had already done
> >  this back in 2003.  But I had never made it work because I couldn't
> >  figure out how to substring a packed field.
> >
> >  The program described file has columns 28-31 as packed, 2 decimals.
> >  That is 7/2, right?
> >    What is the SST?     SST(field 28 4)  doesn't seem right and I am not
> >  even sure how to test it.
> >     
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