Hello,

I have to create DDFs for legacy applications with with cobol data
types, especially in Comp-3 format. We use P.SQL7 SP5.

Since there are many files and a lot of them have more than 100 fields
(from which only some are needed) I tried to group blocks of fields to
one string-type field. This is also necessary because some data is
redefined so there can be text or numbers in one field depending on
another field in the record. (Yes, I know, the data structure IS
awful)

But when I look at such a composite field I see only data up to the
first occurence of 0x00 (as part of a Comp-3 field)

For example: Given the following fields
text1 alphanumeric 30 Bytes
value1 numeric (9 Bytes) comp-3 compressed to 5 Bytes
text2 alphanumeric 30 Bytes

I define the composite field
text char 65 Bytes

and I see only data in the first 30 Bytes if value1 contains a value
which results in a compressed value with 0x00 in the first bytes. If
all bytes of value1 are greater than 0x00 then I can see all 65 bytes.

It looks like type char does what I expect from the type zstring

I tried this with BTSearch, the Data Manager by Classic Software and
V8 SDK Control Center.

Is there any way to get a complete string beyond 0x00 or have I really
to define hundreds of fields manually???

TIA

--