Ascential DS/390 relies fully on the date format for its mapping. So if the format says '9999999', then it cannot deduce the format to be 'CCYYDDD'.
The suggestion (as Mike mentioned) is to remove the 3 lines holding the CC, YY and DDD fields first and then change the group to 'non-group' element by providing it the format of Character (8) and assign the format 'CCYYDDD'.
This is simple to implement but you must be careful to ensure that the fields you delete and not used elsewhere in your program.
So another suggestion is to include a new field that REDEFINES this date group field (level 20) and you can assign the format and datatype to this new field.
I doubt that the 99999999 format represents a 9s complement. I think it just means that there are 8 numeric digits with no specific CC, YY, MM or DD meaning. About the only useful thing I can think of for that format would be to have DataStage insert separator characters.