Michael,

We have a similar situation with an application which ftp's several
critical files to/from our corporate parent's mainframe.  Rather than
worry about restreaming the jobs, we decided to build the file
transfers inside a 'while...endwhile' loop, pausing for 15 minutes if
the transfer was unsuccessful.  The loop terminates either by a
successful transfer or after a time-of-day limit has been reached.

Lee Gunter     [log in to unmask]
HMO Oregon


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: [HP3000-L] :STREAMing a job from within itself
Author:  Michael Voyner <[log in to unmask]> at ~INTERNET
Date:    4/9/97 3:13 PM


Here's one which has had us scratching our heads, to no avail so far, so I
submit it to wiser counsel.

We have an in-house application manager, which handles menus, password
control, streaming jobs etc etc.  Jobs are streamed in the following way :

The user fills out parameters in a screen.  When he or she hits <Enter>,
the application manager reads a "skeleton" JCL file, inserts the job
specific parameters, inserts general parameters such as user and account
names in the job card, keeps the whole lot as a temporary file called
JOBOUT, and programatically streams this file.

We are now trying to get a new procedure working.  This procedure is a job
which does several :DSCOPYs across some very unreliable lines.  After each
:DSCOPY, by checking the value of CIERROR, we can know if the copy was
successful or not.  If it was not, we would like the job to restream itself,
 some minutes later, and so on until the transfer is successfully
completed.

One approach would be to change the application manager so that it
generates a permanent JOBOUT type file, but I can see pitfalls here, and
would only do this as a last resort.  My preference would be for the job to
"autostream" itself.

Can anybody think of a way in which a job stream, which only exists as a
temporary file, can access itself?  I'm sure that one could do something
with %PRINTI, but the site in question (currently on MPE/iX 4.5, shortly to
be on 5.5) does not have MPEX, nor is it likely to have.  PRINTSPF can only
access job input files if it has capabilities greater than those which this
job can possess, and in any case its output would require some serious
reformatting.

At this point I run out of ideas.  All suggestions will be gratefully
received.

TIA
Michael Voyner