COBOL copybooks in wM mainframe with redefines

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Hello.
We are working on a project to retrieve data from our mainframe CICS region. We are trying to use wM mainframe server. The problem is that the data returned to us is dynamic, so we need to be able to reference to a “chunk” of memory by different names. For example, we send a request to our company mainframe (via wM mainframe) with a policy number. This policy could be one of five types (let’s just call them type A, B, C, D, E). The mainframe CICS program does a look up using the policy number and retrieves the data, stores it in a copybook specific to the type, and then returns it to wM mainframe (the policy type is included in the response). By using the type we could map the data for each product.
The limitation seems to be within the wM mainframe tool.
If you have done COBOL programming you know that the REDEFINES option within a copybook will enable a COBOL programmer to slice-and-dice a chunk of memory many different ways. The million dollar question is: Does the webMethods mainframe tool recognize REDEFINES on import ? I find it hard to believe webMethods doesn’t handle REDEFINES. I noticed someone asked a similar question at the webMethods Advantage web site but there is no response.

Any ideas how to handle a dynamic response with wM mainframe ? (other than writing a custom parser ?)

Regards,

Wayne

Wayne Leishman

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I’ll answer my own question. After further investigation we have realized that the webMethods Developer tool does handle COBOL redefines properly.
So: never mind

Wayne

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Hi all we have an interface where we need to convert XML data to FF. where the flatfile should be of copybook structure. I neither could understsnd the mainframe terms in copybook
nor could understand its explanation from mainframe developers. The most confusing term in that is"REDEFINES". I started creating the required fields for this copybook in the ffDictionary
irrespective of the order it is arranged in the copybook. Since it is a fixed length text i started numbering the fields in its record defenition. When i completed around 1/4 of the total number of fields i arrived at the total length of a record in ff which is 26000 bytes. i still have 3/4 of the fields to be numbered with its start and end position. i don’t know hot to handle the beliow situations.

  1. How create the schema for the outbound ff which has record lists inside it’s structure?

  2. How to handle this “REDEFINES” of copybook in webMethods? I’m using wM 6.1

I’m in a critical situation to meet the deadlines. Any help in this situation is very well greatly appreciated.

Thank you all in advance.