Hi In a recent post it was stated "Bottom line, I think it's pretty clearly documented that BSAM/QSAM supports character set conversion, but only when tape is involved. I agree that that's a pretty ridiculous restriction" and this was for both OPRCD=Q and CCSID.
This may seem like a ridiculous restriction but I see no incentive or requirement to change it. OPTCD=Q in particular harks back to when most installations transferred data via tape, not even cartridge in those days. Here in the UK all the main banks used IBM equipment but the central clearing centre for Standing Orders and Direct Debits used an indigenous system and hence OPTCD=Q was used a lot. These days most organisations rely on network transfers and have bespoke products such as Connect Direct to handle the traffic. These products are more than capable of handling character conversion as a minimum. Looking back at the original post it seem that the issue was more sophisticated than simple character conversion and related to field alignment and sizes, i.e. converting a 3-digit field with a length of one and half bytes into a two byte field. Kind Regards - Terry Director KMS-IT Limited 228 Abbeydale Road South Dore Sheffield S17 3LA UK Reg : 3767263 Outgoing e-mails have been scanned, but it is the recipients responsibility to ensure their anti-virus software is up to date. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN