Mysterious (Sort?) Problem

[Ron Burnett]

Hello Everyone,

I'm stumped by this.  

I've got a program that has run with no errors for years ..... we're now
up to PowerHouse 8.19C on MPE/iX 5.5 PP4.

Basically, the program reads a (Image/SQL) data set containing 
the record number/name and a few other details of people who have
an alias, and contains a pointer to another record where all their
data is stored, including the name by which they are perhaps better
known.  (There is nothing sinister about this--it is a medical history system
for a paediatric hospital.)

Anyway, the program sorts the composite record and prints a line-per-patient
report to a disc file which is then FCOPY-ed to tape and sent off to be 
printed on microfiche, along with some other stuff (separate tape, separate
program) which is used, in case the computer system is temporarily
unavailable.

This month, with only just under 19,000 records to sort, the program
reports the correct number of records read, sorted and the expected number
of pages printed, but the output file has only 88 records, beginning in the
middle of the pentultimate page with Zxxx surnames, a page header, then
some more records and end of report.

The program explicitly purges the old file, if it exists (if finfo
('fname','exists') then
purge fname endif).  Yet the STDLIST says, at the end of the report phase,
'fname' exists, OK to purge   ..... and being a job, goes right ahead and 
finishes up without an error.

So how can the 'fname' exist?  Do we have a sort error?  Might it help if
I put in some code to override the default sort workfile specs (how do I do
this?).

I've broken the program into parts, made sure none of the sort items are
numeric, combined the (four separate) sort keys into a single field with
a define, and the results are always the same ...... I only get the bottom
80 or so records.

Any clues?  Is this a known bug?

Many thanks for any help.

Ron Burnett
Women's & Children's Health
Melbourne, Australia
ron@lis.rch.unimelb.edu.au


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