Posting date issue

[DDP021]

Hello,

We currently are attempting to load a report that in itself contains different reports.  So the data isn't consistent at all.  The issue we have run into is trying to pull a date off the data for the POSTING DATE.  Its on every  PAGE 1 so we attempted to use PAGE 1 as a trigger then go down and get the date.  Unfortunately the date itself isnt always in the same position.  Most page just have the date (EX JULY 31, 2009), but other page have a range (July 01.2009 thru July 31, 2009).  When it hits those pages it errors.  Is there a way, using ACIF indexer to only use the FIRST page to pull the POSTING DATE? This is a mainframe data file we are ingesting.

[jsquizz]

have you tried a single trigger that only exists on the first page of the report? I've encountered this and this is how I've handled this

[DDP021]

Yes we have.  Unfortunately there is nothing unique on the first page thats constant thats not in other pages.

[Greg Ira]

How different are the date locations?  For example are the "thru" dates locations consistent?  Basically I would try making a Trigger 2 which the date would be based off and have it point at blank spaces where there wouldn't be any if it was the date thru date format thus stopping the indexer from trying to pull in the date on those pages.

[DDP021]

Greg,

No its not....The date we were trying to use from 1st page moves to different lines on other pages.  And then there are pages that have THROUGH (09/01/2009  THROUGH  09/30/2009) and of course it line up at all with the single date pages.

[Greg Ira]

That definitely makes it difficult.  Of course the obvious question is, can the report creator throw something on the first page for you to trigger on?  Not always an option but I've gotten a few developers to do it before.

[DDP021]

Not to get too wordy (lol) but with this data its was actually on the old Ondemand mainframe system(RDARS) and is no longer retrievable due to an OS upgrade on the mainframe.  IBM was contracted out to pull /extract the data (not sure how) and load it to CMOD using ACIF.  When we ran into this issue, there was an existing old OS390 definition for this report.  IBM was able to use that method to get the data loaded into CMOD 10.1.0.5.    Before we realized that would work we were just trying to see if we could get the ACIF indexer to work.

[Darrell Bryant]

Are you running ACIF on MP or z/OS? ACIF on MP supports regular expressions to locate triggers and fields. This provides additional flexibility in locating them in your report. As I recall, ACIF on MP also support specification of a column range for triggers, but I have not found documentation on that.

[DDP021]

We had an older OS390 definition defined so we were able to use it instead of ACIF