IBM Mainframe Forum

Anyone know how to FTP a VSAM ESDS file to a PC? The dataset that I need to transfer had to be created as a VSAM ESDS because some of the records are longer than the 32K limit allowed in COBOL for variable records. The file is an check image deposit file with records that have check images in them that have binary data that can be up to 200K in length.

From the Comm Svr: IP User's Guide and Commands manual

LS lists entries only for data sets and file types that FTP can process (see Appendix A, "Specifying data sets and files" in topic A.0 for a list). GDG base, VSAM, and ATL library entries are among the types not included in the LS output. See "DIr subcommand--Obtain a list of directory entries" in topic 5.18 to list entries for all types of data sets or files.

Since VSAM files (which would include ESDS of course) are not listed by the LS command, the implication is that FTP cannot handle VSAM files. Which, since VSAM files have structure as well as data, makes a lot of sense -- other platforms would not be able to deal with the structure. I do not believe you will be able to use FTP to directly transfer any VSAM file.

You could, of course, REPRO to a flat file and send that. But I do not know what limits FTP has on record lengths.

REPRO doesn't seem to work with these long record lengths. Chopping the record up into multiple VB or VBS records seems to just end up embedding record lengths(record descriptors) where they don't belong in the middle of the image data.