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It is our mission, within IMS, to deliver high quality code to our clients. Our goal is that this enhancement continues to help drive success for your company!
I am excited to share with you that we have successfully delivered an enhancement that can help with the requested RFE ID 106930.
The enhancement allows returning array element data for a fixed array that is partially defined within a variable length segment area. Previously if all elements of a fixed array were not available within a variable length segment area then the array would return null. It is now possible to retrieve paritial array elements that exist within the variable length segment. For example, a variable length segment that has a minimum of 50 bytes and maximum of 100 bytes that has an array of 5 elements that starts at offset 50, each being 10 bytes in length, would be able to return 1 to 5 array elements depending on the variable area. If you have a variable area of 80, you will receive 3 array elements.
This enhancement has been delivered via IMS service process. The APARs offered the support are:
IMS 14 Java APAR [PTF] PH03415 [UI59326]
IMS 15 Java APAR [PTF] PH03426 [UI59320]
Please share your feedback with us as you implement this enhancement.
Have a great day!
Haley Fung - hfung@us.ibm.com
Hi Mr. Recknagel,
Thank you for your interest in keeping IMS a vital and successful product. Software development has continuously evolved during IMS's lifetime, and so has IMS itself. We have kept pace with, adopted, and implemented many industry standard best practices within our organization, including Continuous Delivery, Design Thinking, and Agile.
When choosing new features to add from the list of requirements in our backlog, we assess which will bring the most value to as many clients as possible and prioritize those.
After reviewing this request for enhancement and assessing its potential value, our decision is to add this item to our backlog. Instead of incorporating dynamic arrays into the JDBC driver, we would provide a way for user to get the raw bytes related to the record they are retrieving. The user can then flexibly apply their own overlay on top of the bytes or use the JZOS Record Generator to help to create the overlay to interpret their own dynamic array structures.
Items in our backlog are expected to be delivered within the next 18 months. We reserve the right to re-prioritize our backlog items as new requests come in. This helps ensure that we are constantly focused on providing the best value to all of our clients.
Have a great day!
Haley Fung - hfung@us.ibm.com
It is unlikely that this RFE will be accepted at this time.
A possible alternative to this solution would be to take advantage of the following RFE:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=100301
The above RFE would provide a way for the user to get the raw bytes related to the record they are retrieving. The user can then apply their own overlay on top of the bytes to interpret their own dynamic ARRAY structures. While this won't be as clean as having the IMS JDBC driver incorporate dynamic arrays directly into the solution it will provide access to the data. There is also a higher chance of this alternative RFE being available sometime within 2017.