Re: Is a General File Maintenance Routine possible?

From: Robert Jones (rjones0_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/17/04 

Date: 17 Sep 2004 13:22:09 -0700

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Hello Shawn

To go off on a somewhat different tack, I would be very wary of
fiddling with files without using the programs designed for the
purpose in a production system. Certainly, for accounting purposes
such as the journals you mentioned, an audit trail of all changes is
highly desirable, and an accountant might be very unhappy with changes
being applied in such an ad-hoc manner as you suggest.

Many organisations would also be generally unhappy about changes being
applied in such an unregulated manner and you would have to be careful
to ensure that the people using such tools have the appropriate
authorisation.

By all means buy, borrow or write general purpose update facilities
but try to restrict your use of them to test environments, they can be
very useful for tweaking test data to satisfy particular conditions.
A print program for each file is often a useful asset, especially if
it also checks and reports fields with invalid data.

As others have mentioned there are several professional products that
will provide batch or online updating of files, using copybooks to
present the data in an easily manipulable form, some might be
shareware or free if you do the appropriate online searches. Some
have even suggested ways of you doing this yourself.

Regards, Robert