Generating a GUID

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

Anyone know how to generate a GUID - known from windows-platforms?
It would be nice if there is a way to do this in batch and cics.
Regards Peter

Nic Clouston · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:48 pm

What, exactly, is a "GUID"? And which language are you referring to - PL/1 or Assembler?

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:54 pm

take a look at RDz.

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

A GUID or UUID is a number like this:
e15717a3-75e6-19fa-b6e1-4028170caf96

It is possible to get one number: TSO UUIDGEN
But I need to do a routine that can be called from PL/I.
If the actually code is C++ or ASM I can call from PL/I on the zOS mainframe.

Regards Peter

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:17 pm

well,
my rdz suggestion is obviously not germane to the discussion.

where, why would you want to generate a GUID/UUID for use on the mainframe?

all the existing guid/uuid generators are based on their environment.
so, again i ask, what do you want to do with the generted guid/uuid?

once you answer that question, you then have the opportunity to define the algorithm. after that it is just a matter of coding,
if this is a unique (read: totally new application) situation.
otherwise, i would suggest surfing a bit, seems to be a lot of literature
about guid/uuid and their generation.

though they are not called guid/uuid on the mainframe,
mainly because they are not 16 char,
mainframe seems to be able to accomplish what it needs with the
permutations available with 8 bytes.

one place guids are used:

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

It is a mainframe program that first needs to get a GUID in the standard format. After that is is send to different recievers as a unique key for "cases". These recievers do something and if they want to update data in our end, they need to send in the GUID we issued.
We do have a solution for this, but we want to improve that - this is what we do:
Generate 50.000 GUID on a windows server, upload the file to mainframe, insert the GUID's in DB2.
Then we can take out a GUID until the table is empty.
We have a job monitoring "low stack" of GUID's and then generate a stack more.
This is not efficient and we wants to skip having DB2 hold the GUID's and just get one on the fly when needed.
I chose to write in this forum for one reason - if one of you already have a nice piece of code why not use that instead of doing my own....

Regards Peter

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:44 pm

Peter Larsen · New User Joined: 03 Aug 2012 Posts: 6 Location: Denmark

I don't know about Italy - but here in Denmark we do share code and helps each other - programmer to programmer.
I have sent some windows API-coding to a competitor - can't really see the problem as long as we talk about small pieces of code.
Of couse I don't share valuable code that is critical for a system - but how to do a doubble pointer-chain in PL/I is not valuable for me.
I have also shared an emal-validator, a small piece of code that tells if an email-adress is ok or not. Of cource you can read the wiki and rfc5322-documentation for this and do it yourself - still nice if you can get an example. Here we also have some sites for sharing pieces of code - of cource this is often C#, Java, C++ and not PL/I+COBOL.
Well if this site is not about helping even with a little code I have joined the wrong forum. Can you tell if this is the normal approach in here? If it is I delete my account again and try elsewhere.

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 6:15 pm