? Just encountered and solved a common issue in COBOL programming! ? Today, while working on a COBOL program, I faced an issue where an improper value was being moved to a `COMP-3` data item defined as, 05 WS-COMP-DATA-ITEM PIC S9(7) COMP-3 VALUE 0. The MOVE statement looked like below, MOVE WS-GROUP-DATA-ITEM TO WS-COMP-DATA-ITEM. After some debugging, I found that the source data item, a group level data item (WS-GROUP-DATA-ITEM) was type less, meaning it was neither numeric nor alphanumeric. This is how the group data item was defined, 05 WS-GROUP-DATA-ITEM. 10 WS-VAR1 ..read more

Vibin' with AoC  I came upon a piece by Herbert Daly a few days ago when browsing my LinkedIn feed. I read the description of a puzzle in the photo that was uploaded with the post since it was intriguing. The puzzle's focus on the holiday season and Christmas kept me interested. I dug more after that and discovered Advent of Code (often referred using its acronym, AoC). I just felt good about AoC and the theme behind it. It is the sole reason behind my inspiration to reactivate this blog after it had been dormant for months. What is Advent Of Code?  Advent of Code is series of Chri ..read more

Hiya! ? It's been some time since I wrote on my blog. Recently, I participated in SHARE Dallas 2022 Hackathon that happened between Mar 28, 2022 and Mar 29, 2022 and it was a great experience that I wanted to treasure. Hence this post ?. This Hackathon showed the modern ways of working on a Mainframe and it, for sure, fascinates the Mainframers as well as those who think of IBM Mainframes as legacy and old stuff.    ⚠ Before we start, I would like to let you know that this is going to be a long post because the takeaway was pretty huge for me. So, I'll be writing ..read more

Hello,  In this blog post, let's take a look at JCL1 challenge in Fundamentals level of IBM Z Xplore.  Before diving into it - For those who are new here, this is a part of series of posts that I'm doing to cover the challenges in IBM Z Xplore. Click ? here for the very first post.  Intro This challenge will let you get to know about the Job Control Language (very famous in the Mainframe world with the shorthand, JCL), though it isn't a programming language. Imagine JCL as something with which you'll get the work done in IBM z/OS.  After you click on the JCL1 challenge's ..read more

Hello ?, In this post, I'll guide you through the second challenge, Files, in the Fundamentals level. If you're new here, I would recommend you to check my previous post on IBM Z Xplore and getting thru the first challenge (VSC1) in the Fundamentals level, ? here.  Let's get started  From the home page of IBM Z Xplore, you just need to click on that tile that say Files. Now, you'll have to watch a video which runs for 2 minutes. This will help you demystify what the equivalents of files ? and folders ?are known as, in IBM Z systems.  Data Sets and ..read more

Hi ? Welcome to my blog. It's been quite some time since I have written anything over here.  It's that time of the year where we usually have an amazing contest opened up by IBM for students and working professionals. It's none other than  ? Drum roll ?, Master the Mainframe  Few things are changed. Master the Mainframe is now The IBM Z Xplore Learning Platform.  The IBM Xplore learning experience is your place to upskill, reskill, and learn new skills as you begin your journey and explore IBM Z and enterprise computing.  This experience is open to all, availa ..read more

 Hello ? In this post, let's see ? how we can concatenate all the existing generations of a dataset. In z/OS, a dataset which have generations (each generation is a successive update) is called as Generation Data Group (abbreviated to GDG). This picture is for the thumbnail of this blog post.  When you have a job whose task is to reference all existing generations of a data set, you would normally need to manually check the generation numbers and insert them into the JCL.  One way around this is to just code the GDG base entry name and the system will automatically pic ..read more

In this post, let's see how we can find the exact length of a string in COBOL.  By exact length, I mean not to account the trailing spaces while calculating the length. That's why we can't use FUNCTION-LENGTH because it returns the length which is sum of all the characters in the string plus the trailing spaces.  In the following example, we have a data item, WS-NAME which can accept alphanumeric data upto 100 characters (PIC X(100)) and that's a lot for a name ?. FYI, a place in New Zealand holds the Guiness World record for longest place name (85 characters). Taumatawhaka ..read more

There is no doubt Mainframes running COBOL powers majority of world's business transactions. Some of the firms are Financial institutions, hospitals, government and logistics.         The very first site that I worked for is (even now) a global leader on the market of business information. They collect, store and process a business's information to generate credit scores and business information reports. The scores assess the business and it helps, say, a bank to use the information in the report when deciding to offer a loan to that business.  Master file ..read more

One of the item that I always strike off ✅ from my checklist whenever I'm assigned with a task of modifying an existing code is Source Code Comparison. It allows me to highlight the difference between different versions of the code. It also acts as a proof for the reviewer that only the intended parts of the code were modified.  Although, CA Endevor lets us use the Changes (C) option to look at the actual lines we've changed, I rely upon SuperCE utility (option 3.13) to compare the modified code and the existing version of the code in Production environment.  Welcome to my blog ..read more