Discarding Alignment Pages from old Mainframe output

[Justin Derrick]

The longer I live, the more I see things from before I was born. 

I'm trying to index a report that has a four-page-long "Alignment Header" -- a format template with X's and 9's and Z's where the data should be, so that the printer operators could print and align the output being printed on what I can only assume are old chain printers.

I'll try and attach a screen shot so you can see what I'm talking about.

Does anyone have any idea on how to discard these from being indexed in CMOD?

Thanks!

-JD.

EDIT: 
Two things:

 The reason I can't use Trigger trickery to fix this is because all the triggers are in the precise locations they should be, it's the data that's all masked as X's.  This includes setting the 'INDEXSTARTBY' value to a higher number, because again, the triggers find everything they need in order to begin. 

I've also tried doing character removal on certain fields, and setting defaults.  That doesn't seem to work at all.  The switch 'flicks' in the direction of character removal, and doesn't set a default value, because it found something at all.

[ewirtz]

Hi Justin,
one possibility is to use an input exit to discard the 'xxx' lines.
Another option is loading the report and delete the 'xxxx' rows with SQL in a housekeeping process (daily, monthly?). This option will only work, if the 'xxxx' lines are a separate document.
On the mainframe a utility could be used to discard the header.

Regards

Egon

[Justin Derrick]

Hi Egon!

Thanks for the good/bad news.  The problem with removing the XXXXX fields from the database is that CMOD can't convert "XXXXXX" (aka MMDDYY) into a date, so it blows up during loading.  I tried doing character removal, but while it removes the X's, the client won't see that blank field and insert a default date ("t") into that field.  (Which might be a bug.)

I'll keep everyone posted on my progress...

-JD.

[ewirtz]

Hi Justin,
if date fields shall be indexed,  the database approach of course will not work. Maybe you like the input exit .. We have input exits running for different reasons.

regards

Egon