When I was first developing SyzSPOOL/z (this is not a marketing plug), I had originally gone with the idea of keeping the data in a HFS but ran into a lot of "double" formatting issues because I had two main features that I absolutely had to have. 1) I had to allow the output to be seen from ISPF and the WEB, and 2) I had to be able to email and FTP the output. I ran into problems with RE-translating some of the non printable characters (especially with non-IBM laser printer formatted output) and trying to decide when to (and not) translate them. One of my first attempted "fixes" was to provide a set of tables and "allow" the user to decide when they were appropriate. That was a REALLY bad idea and the few alpha/beta sites I had did not respond to the idea very well :) They were looking to me to auto-magically decide when to (and not to) translate and didn't want to do the work that I didn't want to do.
I finally worked it with a lot of code and by dropping the initial storing of the data into the HFS. It turns out that deciding based on the destination (once) what to do is easier and more logical than always doing it once and then "sometimes" doing it again. Double translation is never a good idea. There are some other products that are similar to SyzSPOOL/z that do in fact go straight to the USS files, but I don't know if they provide EMAIL and FTP support or not. It's easier if you control the entire environment for the managed spool output once it gets out of JES, but we found that customers liked the idea of being able to have "unfettered" access to their data even if our product were to fail. They didn't have to feel like they were tied to us to get their data, which is something that the other vendors seem to have not seen. It's next to impossible to get directly to the data that they are managing, were as SyzSPOOL/z was designed (the second time :) ) to allow unfettered access to the managed data. I think it was an elegant solution, but I'm biased. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
