simple request/complex solution?

[Pablo Grim]

Hey folks,

I have a simple request from a user.  She wants to be able to retrieve data
from a gl history file on a regular basis with the following selection
criteria:  employees 1-N,  account numbers 1-N, and a single range of pay
periods 1-4.

All of the necessary information is contained in the GL-HISTORY file.  The
file has a data structure like so:

    Record:             GL-HISTORY
    of File:            GL-HISTORY
    Organization:       INDEXED

-- Record Contents --
    Item                                 Type            Size  Occ  Offset
    EMP-KEY                              CHARACTER         32            0
    .EMP-NO                              CHARACTER          6            0
    .PAY-PERIOD-NO                       CHARACTER          6            6
    .ACCT-NO                             CHARACTER         20           12
    PAY-AMOUNT                           INTEGER SIGNED     8           44

 ** EMP-KEY is a 32 byte  REPEATING PRIMARY ASCENDING  index **

    Segment                              Type            Size
    EMP-KEY                              CHARACTER         32

 ** GL-KEY is a 26 byte  REPEATING ALTERNATE ASCENDING  index **

    Segment                              Type            Size
    ACCT-NO                              CHARACTER         20
    EMP-NO                               CHARACTER          6

This report will take a long time to run, so it must execute in batch.
Input of selection criteria will be done from a quick screen, which will
then create and submit the batch job.

Now if i were to simply do a CHOOSE EMP-KEY PARM thing, the user would be
forced to enter all of the combinations (permutations?) of the selection
criteria values, and I believe (my discrete mathmatics is rusty) that this
could be an exponential amount of data entry, hmmm, or actually something
like N1 * N2 * 2.  In other words, not acceptable.

The only way I can think of doing this is to create some kind of
intermediate works files and some nested while loops to load them with all
of the possible combinations of data values.  Then use the work file to
link to the gl-history file.

Seems like kind of a lot of work for a simple request.

ideas?

thanks for hangin' in this far

p



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