[HELP] What is ADAMINT CALL?

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1

Hi guys,

recently, I work on the project with ADAMINT tool. but I have no idea on it.
Could you kindly provide some information about it?
Is there any documentation or reference?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks & Best regards,
Kelvin

2

When Adabas first came out, the only way to communicate with it was “direct calls”. For example, you would write a Cobol program. In the program would be a CALL to Adabas which would pass a control block (always required), and, depending on the command, a Format buffer, a Record buffer, a Search Buffer, a Value Buffer, and an ISN buffer. Preceding the CALL would be lots of cobol statements loading buffers. following the call would be checks for the return code, followed by statements “unloading” the buffers.

If you go to the Adabas documentation you can see examples of the Control Block and the various buffers. You will note how tedious it was to code Direct calls.

Several Adabas shops set up special groups of people to write the direct calls for all the other programmers. Then several shops experimented with software to “write” the calls to Adabas. Some particularly good software of this genre was developed by Shell Oil. Their inhouse product was called “Envelope”.

I do not know the details of what transpired next, but Software AG came out with a product called Adamint, that looked a lot like Adamint. Indeed, there were several modules of Adamint that had ENV in their names.

Until Natural appeared several years later, Adamint was a popular way to access Adabas. Adabas stood for Adabas Macro Interface… It worked as follows. There was still a separation (at most, but not all shops) between the cobol programmers and the Adamint people. The cobol programmer would plan out their program. Then they would tell the adamint people what they had to do with regard to Adabas.

The adamint people, instead of having to write subroutines “longhand” (usually in cobol) to call adabas, would use Macros, from Adamint to create the “access modules”. In the cobol application program, the programmer would code calls, not to Adabas, but to the access modules. Then the access module would call Adabas; then the access module would return control to the application program.

Note this was not an efficieny tool. There is an extra call involved. Instead of the cobol program calling adabas, it would call the “intermediate” access module, which called adabas. The true benefit of Adamint was that the entire team of application programmers did not have to learn direct calls, and, the access to adabas was standardized.

The term “Adamint call” was typically used to refer to the call from a cobol program to an access module.

steve

3

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your quickly response!
I got it.

Best regards,
kelvin

4

Hi,

i got a requirement from customer to compile the new adamint call program?

A new field got added to the adabas file and the associated program is changed. record buffer is modified.

can i have a jcl for this?

Thanks,
Naresh

5

Assuming I have this correct;

First, you will have to change and recompile your cobol program(s).

Then you will have to change the Adamint module(s) to reflect the new field(s) from the file.

Finally, you can run the cobol program(s) with the new access module(s). Should be a simple fix, especially if it is only one field.

Has the shop where you are working ever thought about replacing Adamint with Natural? It is far easier to find Natural programmers than Cobol programmers who know Adabas and Adamint (witness the fact that you had to go out of shop for a very simple adamint change).

6

as far as JCL is concerned, you need to ask your systems programmers for JCL to compile ASSEMBLER. Adamints are Assembler macros and require an assemble and link before they can be called by your COBOL programs. Where Steve says “you will have to change the Adamint modules…” you will need to follow with the assemble-and-link step.

Note that Adamints have not been supported by Software AG for some time (decades), so to re-assemble modified Adamints your site will have to have retained the Adamint macro library separately from any upgraded installation done.