May 2005 Technical Tip – Easytrieve: A Cautionary Note on the use of Packed Decimal Fields

May 2005 Technical Tip – Easytrieve: A Cautionary Note on the use of Packed Decimal Fields

Last month I had a former student tell me that Easytrieve should not be used on packed decimal fields because it treated all packed decimal fields as unsigned. I told her that this was not the case and set about to write a short Easytrieve program to verify this. The results surprised me!

What I discovered was that if a decimal specification is omitted, the sign is indeed lost! The following program will serve to demonstrate:

//* JOBCARD HERE
//STEP010 EXEC PGM=EZTPA00                                                      
//***************************************************************               
//*  IF YOU LEAVE OFF DECIMAL SPECIFICATION YOU LOSE THE SIGN!  *               
//***************************************************************               
//MYINPUT  DD *                                                                 
12345        UNSIGNED                                                           
1234E        POSITIVE                                                           
1234N        NEGATIVE                                                           
//MYOUTPUT DD DSN=&&PACKED,DISP=(NEW,PASS),UNIT=SYSDA,                          
//            SPACE=(TRK,(1,1),RLSE),                                           
//            DCB=(RECFM=FB,LRECL=10,BLKSIZE=0)                                 
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*                                                          
//SYSIN    DD *                                                                 
FILE MYINPUT                                                                    
ZONED     1  5  N  0                                                            
                                                                                
FILE MYOUTPUT                                                                   
PACKED1   1  3  P  0                                                            
PACKED2   5  3  P                                                               
                                                                                
JOB INPUT MYINPUT                                                               
   PACKED1 = ZONED                                                              
   PACKED2 = ZONED                                                              
   PUT MYOUTPUT                                                                 
                                                                                
//STEP020 EXEC PGM=IDCAMS                                                       
//SYSIN    DD *                                                                 
  PRINT INFILE(MYINPUT) HEX                                                     
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*                                                          
//MYINPUT  DD DSN=&&PACKED,DISP=(OLD,DELETE)                                    
//

The IDCAMS dump follows. You can see the sign in the first field but not in the second:

RECORD SEQUENCE NUMBER - 1
 12345C4012345F404040
 
RECORD SEQUENCE NUMBER - 2
 12345C4012345F404040
 
RECORD SEQUENCE NUMBER - 3
 12345D4012345F404040

The moral of this story is always include the decimal specification for packed decimal fields.

We hope you will consider Caliber Data Training when searching for Easytrieve training.