IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi all,
I'm new to REXX.
I need to split the I/P file based on a string (Policy number) in the I/P file into multiple O/P files based on the policy number. All the records pertaining to a particular policy number should get into one O/P file. But, the number of different policies is not known before the run. The O/P files need to be allocated dynamically using a suffix in the file name. The O/P files created should be equal to the number of different policies in the Input file.
Can someone help how I can do it using REXX.

Thank you.

where is that You are facing problems, the logic or the code ?

Code. I'm new to REXX. Can you please help me with the code?

Nireesha234 wrote:Can you please help me with the code?

We should be able to. What do you have so far?

I don't know anything about REXX. If you can provide me from scratch, it will be very very helpful. I'm a COBOL/JCL programmer. Using COBOL or JCL, it's just practically not possible to allocate O/P files dynamically. Hence, thinking of using REXX for getting this done.

Any good docs on file manipulation using REXX will also help.

Nireesha234 wrote:Using COBOL or JCL, it's just practically not possible to allocate O/P files dynamically.

It's certainly doable either way, either building dynamic JCL or using dynamic allocation calls in a COBOL program.

Let me ask. Is this a one-time ad-hoc project that you won't need to use again? How much data are you talking about here (don't forget that REXX is very inefficient for large amounts of data)? Is this going to be run in the foreground or in batch? How well-versed are you with using TSO commands?

It's not a one time project. It's going to run in batch.
We will be having huge data; more than a 100 thousand records.
I was not aware of dynamic allocation calls in COBOL and JCL. Do you know how to use it? If it is possible with COBOL/JCL, then I would go with COBOL or JCL.

Anyway, I guess the code would go something like this (presuming REXX running in TSO/E):

Read a record: EXECIO.
Find the policy number: POS or SUBSTR or WORDPOS and store it.
Peform the allocation of the output using TSO: ALLOCATE and FREE.
Read and write until the policy number changes: EXECIO and IF and DO.
Do the new allocation, store the new policy number, and continue until EOF.

Thanks, MrSpock. This is more than helpful for me. I'll start working on this and let you know how it goes.