I am wondering if anyone else thinks the following might be a nice enhancement to the z/OS FTP server. At present, when you transfer a file to/from another system, you can basically only do a BIN (null) or ASCII transformation. We have been doing a lot of ftp's to a Windows server, so we really need an ASCII transformation. The problem is that our real data, in a VSAM data set, has PACKED DECIMAL and 32 bit internal binary numbers and not just character data. So, I was thinking that it might be nice to have a FTP server command which would set up a "global" data transformation program as in intermediary. That is, the client (on Windows) would do something like:
quote outxform somepgm get vsam.dataset And what the FTP server would do is invoke "somepgm" with a parameter of "vsam.dataset". The "somepgm" would allocate & open the given data set. It would then read the data; transform it; then return the transformed record(s) to ftp. This would be conceptually similar to what COBOL and SORT do when the SORT verb in a program has the USING INPUT PROCEDURE phrase. Perhaps the parameters to "somepgm" would be a character string and the address of a "subroutine" to call to return a record back to the ftp server. Or maybe something similar to how ftp can do an SQL query, but more generic: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.halu001/db2sqlquerysubmitftps.htm -- "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
