DSXchange

Hi All,

Could you please help me with a couple questions on the External Routine Stage?

I have a COBOL date conversion program that handles 5 different types of conversions (e.g. It can convert a Julian date to a calender date or a gregorian date, etc). The mainframe copybook used by this program have 5 different redefines.

When I call this routine using the external routine stage in a DS Mainframe job, it seems that I can only bring in 1 type per routine set up in the Manager. In other words, it seems that I need to set up 5 different routines in Manager even though all 5 DS routins will be pointing to the same COBOL routine. When I set up the DS routine in Manager with 5 different types, the DS mainframe job in Designer can only map to 1 type. Could you please let me know if there is any way to set up the routin in Manager that contains 5 different types where the routine can be use by multiple jobs depending on each job's requirement of the type of dates that needs to be converted to?

Another questions is: Could you please let me know if the Parallel jobs have a stage that has the similar function as the External routine stage for the mainframe jobs? I am new to DataStage and have not gone to training on Parallel jobs.

Thanks.
Fan

Parallel jobs have custom (Orchestrate), buildop (your own operator, written in C) and wrapper (wrapping a UNIX command) stages. Refer to Chapter 54 of the DataStage Enterprise Edition Parallel Job Developer's Guide for more information. DataStage manuals are in the Docs folder where your DataStage client software is installed.

Thanks for the info.

For the external routines, I decided to clone the COBOL program on MVS under different names for each conversion function since I can't seem to have them all point to the same program. I then set up individual routines in DS Manager to point to the cloned COBOL programs for each specific conversion function.

Please let me know if you can think of other ways to call a COBOL program more efficiently.

Thanks.