Header also displayed after every 1000 records

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

The output file structre is
OUTFILE DD DSN=DATADEV9.OST.FILELIST.AVK,
DISP=(MOD,DELETE),UNIT=DISK,
SPACE=(TRK,(100,50),RLSE),
DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=128,BLKSIZE=0)

We are writing the header only once in separate para but I could able to see some part of header also getting displayed after every 1000 records in the output file. TCE-CLASS is a part of header which get overwritten after every 1000 records. Could you please help me out here?

Many Thanks

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:11 pm

You are not telling anything useful...
just that something does not work the way You expect

do not post screen shots, the just clutter the forum,
a plain TEXT cut and paste with the code tags is more than enough
( the screen shot has been deleted )
also because it tells nothing useful

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

Apologies for the screen shot.Thanks for the comments. Let me put it in this way.

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:28 pm

as I said showing that the output does not match Your expectations does not give any hint on the why.

would posting a bit of code so hard ?

Your data even if useless has been code tagged to show the look

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:46 pm

well, posting some code obviously is not too hard,
possibly posting some useful code is

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:35 pm

1. what is the record count of your input file?

2. unless you are deleting your output file in a previous step
or separate job,
this is sorta stupid

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

Sorry Dbz, i copied some other file. Please find below the file detials. I was wondering whether it is something to do with block or track!!

my record length is 128 , The header is getting ovelapped in after 1000 records = 128000

128000 bytes == 5*25600(current block size).

OUTFILE DD DSN=DATDEV9.OST.FILELIST.CITYDB,
DISP=(NEW,CATLG,CATLG),
UNIT=DISK,SPACE=(CYL,(20,20),RLSE),
DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=128,BLKSIZE=25600)

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:55 pm

i repeat my question: 1. what is the record count of your input file?

also a tip.

instead of giving us suggestions to a problem that you have been unable to solve,
give us the information that we ask for.

and no, i doubt that the problem stems from

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

The record count of the output file is 2280. We are doing an area sweep and writing it to an output file.

Please let me know if any other info required.
Thanks,

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:10 pm

i repeat my question: 1. what is the record count of your input file?

and i'll bite: what is an area sweep?

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:11 pm

we are just wasting time here.
what You have looks like some kind of storage overlay
the snippet posted is not enough to do any problem determination

what does the program do every 1000 records
what happens when You use as output a certainly empty/NEW dataset

robert_wood · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:38 pm

@ dbz

"Area sweep" is an IDMS record access method.

You have to be mighty careful with this access method if accessing more than one record type, since only one record can be CURRENT of AREA.

Too much information...

Cheers Rob

dbzTHEdinosauer · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 4:47 pm

Rob,
thx

reason I asked is that the TS has provided nothing helpful,
and the obvious solution is some kind of 1000 iteration loop.

Robert Sample · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 5:45 pm

Bill Woodger · Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2012 7:54 pm

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

This info is very helpful . Let me check once.

athulvijay · New User Joined: 01 Jul 2010 Posts: 17 Location: PUNE

This info was a real help. It is the problem with default beffer size.
128000byte = 25600*5
5 is the default buffer number of QSAM. It mean to me like once 5 buffer(let take 1 block as one buffer) is filled actual write takes place. So the filler get displayed only after every 1000 records.

---
I tried running a job with
output dataset having RECL = 128 and BLOCK Size = 27904.
Now,
27904/128 = 218 and 218*5 = 1090.
In the output dataset the header record were repeating after 1090 records

similarly another try , RECL was 112 and BLK Size was 27888.
27888/112 = 249 and 249 * 5 = 1245
The header was repeating after every 1245 records in the dataset

So this shows there is no glitch in our code.

Thanks alot.

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 2:36 pm

Robert Sample · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 3:35 pm

athulvijay, you did EXACTLY what I recommended in my earlier post, and the results were exactly what I thought would happen, yet your conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion I provided.

Contrary to what you think, this particular problem CANNOT be caused anywhere except in your program. And your reaction tells me you are another one of the Immaculate Programmers -- you never wrote a bad line of code, so every problem MUST be a system problem (since your code could never be wrong). Professional programmers see a problem and immediately ask what they could have done in their code to cause that problem; Immaculate Programmer see a problem and blame the system for days (or in some cases, months) until it is proven that their code is flawed.

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 3:39 pm

and ...

don.leahy · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 6:42 pm

Bill Woodger · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 8:49 pm

If you refuse to find out what the problem is yourself, and refuse to let anyone see your code, all I can suggest is this: settle on a particular blocksize. Calculate how many records your glitch-free code can write before somehow causing an error. Make a new version of your program, which takes a parameter. In the parameter, tell your program how many records to read before it starts writing. Write the number-of-records-calculated minus one. Close up and stop. Execute the program, with different parameters each time, until your input is processed. Concatenate the output files as input to the next task.

If you don't fancy that, show us the code that you think is relevant, and any other code that we ask for, and answer any questions we ask. Show us your compile options.

Or, sort it out yourself. But you can't, becuase you don't accept the possibility that the error can be yours. So, go back to the above, or discover a business reason for a smaller input file.

Bill Woodger · Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2012 6:22 am

From an earlier comment, no, I can't really think of a normal way to do anything too clever with Cobol writing a sequential fixed-length file.

The record shown is not a complete header. It means that the "header" data was either put there, sourced from the normal fields, or not all the data in the record-area was overwritten.

Don's point about the STRING could be relevant, but the TS has already failed to provide the code for the creation of the data records on the file as requested. If using STRING to create the data records, I also suspect the problem will be there. Reference-modification would be the other lazy way to possibly screw it up.

It is probably no co-incidence that the single data record shown has hyphens in the positions that are alleged to be part of the header on the record prior to it.

It is possible that TS feels he is initialising the record, but is not. If using STRING or reference modification only to populate, the defintion could be this: