Reporting Errors in QTP - The Solution

[Ron Burnett]

Thanks to those who responded to my query.

I should have mentioned that the purpose of the exercise was to
unload data from an IMAGE/SQL database in preparation for
migration to another platform, different development environment.
Therefore, tracking down the source of the error wasn't the issue ....
just finding where the failure was and manually correcting it.

I think one single data conversion error in nearly 900,000 records
isn't too bad.  But you're right .... the COBOL program shouldn't
have allowed it to happen.

The solution was:  since I had the record number of the one with the
illegal date, I simply created another subfile WITHOUT converting
the date field to ASCII, then used FCOPY to home in on the
record number in that file and copy it plus/minus a few records
to screen, and it was easy to spot.  This gave me the key value,
which I could then easily use to interactively correct the record.

A more elegant solution would have been to update the PDL to
give me an X8 character field redefining the date field, then write
code to examine that variable.  The dictionary is very large, and
that seemed too much work for too little result.  But I'd certainly
do that if the applications were staying around for much longer.

Cheers,
Ron Burnett
ron@cryptic.rch.unimelb.edu.au