I have done a decompress, compress & load to add alpha fields to a PE before but I don’t know how to do this for a date (Format D) field.
Is there something special that needs to be inserted in the ADACMP Format card to add in the numeric bytes?
The field definition needs an additional keyword DT=E(xxx).
So for example a new date field named DD in a periodic group.
1,PG,PE
2,DD,8,U,NU,DT=E(DATE)
The default field length is defined as 8, which is sufficient to store a date value of the form ‘YYYYMMDD’.
The DT=E(DATE) tells Adabas to check a value to be inserted or updated that its parts are valid numbers e.g. for month MM are in the range of ‘01’ - ‘12’.
If you use the field with NATURAL you might want to use NATDATE which counts the number of days since year zero.
The field definition then looks like:
2,DD,4,P,NU,DT=E(NATDATE)
This is described in detail here
http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/documentation/adabas/ada842mfr/util/flddefs.htm#fndef_fld_options_DT