Re: Compare files - with different date fields

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Howard Brazee
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:11 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Compare files - with different date fields

I'd like to create a compare job that will compare two files.

One file should have the current date (YYYYMMDD) in columns 72-79 of a
406 column record, but the other should have a different current date
in
the same format.

My user would like to not just ignore these dates, but have something
that shows him that the two files are identical, except one had
20080603
and the other had 20080602 (or whatever) for the dates. I'd just
exclude those fields, and use TSO to exclude exceptions, but I'm not
the
user.

Any simple solutions?

I can tell you two "simple" two-comparison-pass solutions for two
different data file compare products: Comparex and Insync. You will
also need two additional passes with SORT (one per file) to finish the
job.

In each comparison product there is a parameter that tells the product
to stop *reporting* differences after N have been displayed. Set this
parameter to 1 and you will get 1 reported difference, but for both
products the files will still be compared to EOF and the statistics at
EOF will tell you how many records were different.

For Comparex this would be "CONTINUE,MAXDIFF=1". For INSYNC you would
use "MAXREPORT=1".

You will need to make two comparison passes, one with the date field
masked and no reporting limit and one without a mask and with the
"report" value set to 1.

The masked comparison pass will tell you if any field except the date
field is different in any records. The unmasked pass will give you the
report of the difference in the first record with a different date field
and a count of differences that should be equal to the record count (I'm
assuming here that all the records have the date field).

HOWWEVER, of course this will not tell you if all the differences are
for the *same* dates. You will need two more passes (one for each file)
using MERGE FIELDS=(date field) combined with SUM FIELDS=(NONE) to
determine if there is more than one date in each file. If the output of
the merge pass is more than one record output from the merge pass then
there is more than one date in each file.

Hope that helps.

Peter


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