MIMS 4.1 to Ellipse: Conversion of RDL source 1

[Calator]

Hi,

We are about to start on the conversion of RDL reports from MIMS 4.1 under Unix&Oracle to Ellipse. Question to people who went through the process: any changes we need to be aware of? Any differences compared to previous upgrades? is compiling/build still achieved in the same manner using "mscomp"?
Thanks

 

[Drw]

We upgraded to 5.2.3.2 (tux) from 4.3.1 (mincom tp) (oracle 8.1.7/tru64 5.1a) in June... most of our rdl's required no changes, just a few cross references and the MSF900 browse (no more julian dates). mscompile.pl is the new compile script, half the time I use this script at the command line, the rest through EAC (Ellipse Administration Console).

Drew

 

[Calator]

Thanks Drew!Much appreciated.

Do you or anyone else have an idea of the following issues I've encountered so far:

1. I am getting files in the work directory created with an autoincrement extension eg .77 .78 etc, while in 4.1 they all had a constant extension of .3015i. This creates a problem with all our Unix scripts that process extract files etc, they would require changes to handle variable file names, how can we overcome that? Is there an option to revert to 4.1 behaviour with files created with constant extension?

2. "DELETE" command in batch.tbl does not appear to work, may be related to question 1, I have not tried yet any other file commands such as PRESENT, COPY, RENAME

3. Message during RDL compile:
DB-IO line 2218, Unknown Ident A ()
compile finished ok and report appears to work, not sure if ok, what does the message mean?

4. what is the equivalent of 4.1 command
mimsoci -ibg
we were using it to execute utility and housekeeping functions from the Unix command line

5. where is the "script" directory with Ellipse, as
cd script no longer takes me to the Unix scripts

 

[Drw]

1). In Ellipse all jobs have a $BEC_JOBNUM suffix appended to the files in the work and log directories. I have found there to be mostly benefits (only a couple of negatives) to this new feature. The main advantage is you can now run reports at the same time and not overwrite an output/input file as they each have a unique job number.
In the batch.tbl you will need to use the key words COPY, EXEC, RENFRP, RENAME, RENTOP, RENFRP and SORT. I have never found the key words ABSENT, CREATE or DELETE useful on a Unix system. If you lookup the 'Background Event Connector Installation and Operations Guide and Reference' you should have received in your Ellipse info pack cd from Mincom you will see a description of each and how they handle the new $BEC_JOBNUM evar.
So when I use a unix script in the batch.tbl I pass it the $BEC_JOBNUM evar as a parameter.

2) – see above considering the $BEC_JOBNUM being used should now negate the use of Delete keyword because the previous job run would have a differing $BEC-JOBNUM, however in 4.3 on a Unix system if a batch job was creating a new output file and one already existed it was automatically overwritten.

3) hmmmm, good question – you may need to confirm all your source code in compiled, particularly the DBIO routines.

4) mimsrts

5) There is no generic script or Local directories in Ellipse. Scripts for each component are generally located in a bin (or script) directory in the components directory structure being either a source or runtime install location. Depending on the user you are logging on with and what profile is selected will determine what components you can manage or are subscribed to. Once again you should refer to the relevant manual on the Info pack cd from Mincom.


Drew

 

[Calator]

Thanks Drew, this is fantastic help!

I have tried mimsrts with the command:
>mimsrts MSL081
in order to load request parameters from file $work/MST081 into Ellipse and it appears to work! That's great.

To get us quickly started with the rest, could you pls give me an "idiot's" type example:

-your EXEC line for batch.tbl calling a script and passing the BEC variable

-where should we place the actual script in the application instance of ELLIPSE, is it that we create the 'script' or 'bin' directory ourselves under the 'ellipse' directory tree?

Back to the "delete" command, I see what you're saying, I was going by the fact that the batch.tbl as supplied by Mincom does have entries for "delete", the fact that the command was not working, caused me to think, how would the other commands work eg COPY, RENAME, as file extension are now variable. There are no exmaples in the Mincom standard batch.tbl of such commands, only CREATE, DELETE and PRESENT are present,they include a .SEQ extension, eg does this look ok to you:

Online MSR19A PRESENT -PARAM MSE19A.SEQ -Description Rec_Stock_Xfer_Extract_File
Online MSR19A MSR195 -Description Recommend_Stock_Transfer_Report -Report A -Norequest
Online MSR19A DELETE -PARAM MSE19A.SEQ -Description Rec_Stock_Xfer_Extract_File
Online MSR19B DELETE -PARAM MSE19B.SEQ -Description Binning_Advice_Extract_File
Online MSR19B CREATE -Param MSE19B.SEQ 107 F -Description Binning_Advice_Extract_File

 

[Drw]

Below is an extract of our EFT payments batch.
1st line runs the task msb284 and prints the A and B reports.
2nd line executes the unix (tru 64) blocking command for the MSB284 output file, you will notice I am copying this to the older style .seq extension as I did not want to affect the upload process to the bank after we upgraded which is expecting a file called MSI284A.SEQ and we never run an eft at the same time… (maybe a process I can clean up later)
3rd line I take a backup copy of the newly created blocked file with a date extension
4th line execute an ftp session with the host name elleft (all ftp commands for elleft are contained in the .netrc of the Ellipse runtime user)
5th line run custom printed remittance report
6th line run custom faxed remittance report
7th line execute the unix script to modify the output report from our custom faxed program (removing control chars) and ftp to our TOS-FAX server. This script also handles faxes for RFQ’s and PO’s so I pass it 3 parameters to tell it which report to modify, a switch for the type of fax and the BEC_JOBNUM so I can append the correct job number to the report file.
You may have noticed I do not use the MSBFAX batch program which overcomes several short comings the the Mincom standard way of faxing.
Online MSB284 MSB284 -Description Bank_Deposit_Interface_Report -Report A.B
Online MSB284 EXEC -PARAM "dd if=MSI284A.$BEC_JOBNUM of=MSI284A.SEQ conv=unblock ibs=120 cbs=120 obs=120"
Online MSB284 EXEC -PARAM "cp MSI284A.SEQ MSI284A.SEQ.`date +%b%d`.`date +%H%M%OS`"
Online MSB284 EXEC -PARAM "/usr/bin/ftp elleft"
Online MSB284 GORRAP -Description EFT_Payment_Remittance_Advice_Prnt -Report A
Online MSB284 GORRAF -Description EFT_Payment_Remittance_Advice_Fax
Online MSB284 EXEC PARAM "/var/opt/mincom/ellipse/ellprd/gcfax GORRAFA E $BEC_JOBNUM"

I would create a new directory structue under /opt/Mincom/ (eg /opt/Mincom/cust/v1_0/bin) for all your custom scripts and add this to the path evar, that way it is in line with new (or best practice) structure

As far as the entries in the Mincom supplied batch.tbl, these could be either from very old systems (eg. IBM systems acted differently where you had to delete the file first before you could create it – unlike modern unix), programmers who don’t know what they are doing or not cleaning up the baseline batch.tbl because it doesn’t really cause any harm to leave old keywords there…
Personally in the example you gave above if you are running on HP/Sun unix or similar I would get rid of all entries except for
Online MSR19A MSR195 -Description Recommend_Stock_Transfer_Report -Report A -Norequest

All keywords do consider the new $BEC_JOBNUM evar, that is why there are 4 rename type keywords that either include or exclude it.

Drew (dwolrige@goldcoast.qld.gov.au)

 

[Calator]

Drew,
Thanks a lot, you have earned your stars, I think this pretty much clarifies my questions, very helpful! I tried the suggested approach using $BEC_JOBNUM and it worked ok!

Calator

 

[sjwales]

Calator,

In answer to your #3 question above, I think you'll find that you'll get that message whenever you're compiling an RDL (or possibly even cobol source, I'm not sure) where you have multiple record type definitions (such as MSF900 with it's base table and then all the sub tables, one for each record type.

It is just a warning and the programs do compile and run OK, at least from what I've seen.

As for your scripts, what we've done is created a directory called /opt/mincom/site_tools/bin and we place custom scripts in there. You just need to make sure that whatever directory you choose is in your PATH.

If you wanted to get tricky, I suppose you could have /opt/mincom/site_tools/prod/bin and /opt/mincom/site_tools/test/bin and path them out appropriately for prod and test so that you can actually have a non production quality script out there for testing without mucking up anything in your production environment until it had been tested.

Steve

stephen.wales@riotinto.com

 

[Calator]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your contribution. Your suggestion for scripts handling is very sensible.
The first issue with the compile message I believe denotes something unusual as I only got that with one RDL. I believe the warning you are talking about is quite different and quite common at the RDL precompiling stage, it is:
*** WARNING *** More than 2 rec types for MSFxxx - check initialisation
Pls see below an excerpt from my compile log, showing both messages:
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf723hv.mac]
DB-IO line 2218, Unknown Ident A ()
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf808sq.mac]
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf808hv.mac]
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf720sq.mac]
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf720hv.mac]
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf000sq.mac]
[Using macro source file /opt/mincom/ellipse/v5_2_3_4/db_macro/msf000hv.mac]
*** WARNING *** More than 2 rec types for MSF801 - check initialisation