What is the practical usage of INREC?

sushmitha.prasad · New User Joined: 08 Jul 2008 Posts: 2 Location: India

Where do we use INREC practically? What is the need to reformat the records before sorting? Can you provide me a practical example?

Anuj Dhawan · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 1:47 pm

Hi,

The INREC control statement allows you to reformat the input records before they are processed; that is, to define which parts of the input record are to be included in the reformatted input record, in what order they are to appear, and how they are to be aligned.

You do this by defining one or more fields from the input record. The reformatted input record consists of only those fields, in the order in which you have specified them, and aligned on the boundaries or in the columns you have indicated.

You can find complete details of DFSORT's INREC statement online at:

publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/ICECA109/3.8?DT=20020722140254
and examples at:

publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/ICECA109/3.8.2?SHELF=&DT=20020722140254

If you need something more specific, tell us what exactly you need.

Escapa · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 6:54 pm

Before answering your question..
Why do you think it is useless?
any reasons???

Frank Yaeger · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 10:36 pm

As a practical example, say you have groups of records each with a header that has a key, and detail and trailer records that don't have a key, but you want to sort the groups of records by the key. You could use DFSORT's WHEN=GROUP function in INREC to propagate the key from the first record of the group to the other records of the group and then SORT on the key in every record. You can do this with INREC because it's processed before SORT. You could NOT do this with OUTREC because it's processed after SORT.

Escapa · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 10:48 am

One more simple example of using inrec is
Overcoming overflow problem while summing.
we need to add ZEROs from inrec to increase the length...