Calling myself a novice would be inflating my skills/knowledge.

My situation and following question:

I have a customer (a Human Resources Department) that requires a
web-based system for the purposes of allowing employees to self-enroll
in their employee benefits of choice. This will not be a problem for
us. Where we will soon be stumped are the following additional
requirements:

#1 That after completion of the web-based enrollment, we provide the
customer's IT department with an EBCIDC file (mixed data types) that
must be packed/zoned for certain of the data fields, according to their
specs. An example would be EMPLOYEE_NMBR, packed, field length
9....0(precision), buffer length 5, buffer position 19.., etc. After we
deliver, their IT department will do their thing to update their system
(AS400, DB2). As near as I can understand, the customer's IT group is
either too busy or too cranky to set up this "web-data collection" on
their own. Apparently there is a hornets nest of intra-company
politics (HR vs IT). I'd rather not be the one to kick the hive.

#2 That we should expect 0 help from IT when it comes to this
"packing/zoning" stuff.

#3 That we leave JDBC/ODBC out of it. IT has no interest.

There are about 75 fields spread across 5 files, a few of which are CHAR
and are not packed/zoned.

We have located (but not purchased) commercial, desktop software that
can get the data from ASCII to EBCIDC, but we are clueless on getting it
packed/zoned correctly. I'd rather not use a service if this particular
wheel has already been invented. We do NOT have access to a AS400/DB2
system.

I have a feeling this whole "packing" thing is left over from the old
days and will probably save < 1 meg of space, but we do not have a
choice.

Any help..... clues.... suggestions? Please use small words. I'm the
salesguy :•)

Thanks!

Mike


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You're right in that you are a subnovice. This list does not have any
relationship to what you are asking except that it deals with a computer.


Since I've been in this field almost 30 years I at least understand your
question, although I haven't worked with packed decimal for ages.

There must be a software package that both changes ASCII to EBCDIC and
also will put numbers in packed decimal format. I think you should be able
to find software on the web and talk to their sales or technical person.

If you can't find a package, then you could use a cobol programmer who
works on an IBM mainframe. It's simple to do this in Cobol, you just move
number in a regular numeric field to a number in comp-3 format and its
packed in one cobol command:

MOVE X TO X-COMP3.

The algorithm for changing a numeric field to packed is pretty simple if
you don't have cobol on an IBM mainframe. I don't remember the exact rules
but it takes a programmer about 5 minutes to understand the rules.
Changing to packed decimal cuts down the space requirements by almost 50%.




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On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 vhikida (AT) inreach (DOT) com wrote:


At CPAN, we have Convert-EBCDIC which should do the ASCII/EBCDIC
stuff. Another module is Convert::IBM390, which should handle
packed decimals. Searching for "packed decimal" at perlmonks.org
turned up a few things, including another search term (COMP-3).

The following web site was mentioned in the COMP-3 discussion, and
may be of interest:
http://digilander.libero.it/foxes/Packed_Decimal.htm

Gord


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On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 14:29:10 -0700 (PDT), vhikida (AT) inreach (DOT) com
<vhikida (AT) inreach (DOT) com> wrote:
You know, viewing these exact characters caused me to violently slam
my laptop shut and run screaming from the house...

(Sorry, off-topic but simply uncontrollable)

-- Mitch

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