I sincerely apologize for this issue and we continue to strive to make all Robelle software as high quality as possible. Suprtool
is tested every evening on MPE, HP-UX (PA-RISC and Itanium), Linux x86, in both real and virtual environments against multiple
flavours of Eloquence and versions of the operating system. We will continue to do so and continue to strengthen the amount of
testing done, unfortunately this issue did not appear in tests as it was very specific.
If you have any further questions or need further details I can always be reached at neil@robelle.com or my Office number at 408.200.4487.
Sincerely,
Neil Armstrong
Robelle
Questions and Solutions
We often get questions from the Fiserv user base and we typically try to write
an application note on major issues. We have a FAQ, but we also collect some of these
application notes, which I have collected here:
Suprtool has a number of functions that require a "$" sign in front of them. This causes an issue with UC4 as it tries to resolve any variables.
So if a script has a $lookup in it and $lookup is not a variable then the $lookup is removed, for example what would happen is:
if $lookup(mytable,key)
becomes:
if (mytable,key)
All that needs to happen is you "Escape Out" the Environment Variable from being resolved by changing the text to be:
if \$lookup(mytable,key)
When you do this UC4, (and HP-UX for that matter), now knows that the $lookup is not a token that needs to be resolved as an environment variable but
the $lookup is a literal.
This is one of the most frequently asked questions from our Fiserv customers!
Direct Robelle Support
As a Fiserv customer who is migrating, you receive copies of all the
Robelle products: Qedit, Suprtool and Qedit for Windows. But your technical
support is through Summit.
To benefit fully from the Robelle products, you may want to deal directly with
Robelle technical support.
We welcome such inquiries
and would be glad to answer all your questions.
We have experience with many Summit sites who have exploited our software's
power to get more out of their Summit system.
Tell me about direct Robelle support!
New for Fiserv
Our interaction with Fiserv customers over time have directly inspired
enhancements to our products:
When Neil Armstrong, the Suprtool Software Architect, travelled to
Fiserv to do staff training, he came back with many excellent
suggestions, which he quickly added to Suprtool:
$split was added
for Fiserv and came directly from their format for storing names, e.g.
Smith / Bill.
$subtotal to keep running totals
on any numeric field and reset on sort breaks.
Recently, we received a number of questions related to column operations in Qedit.
Some Fiserv sites used Quad (a contributed library editor) on the HP
3000 and were transitioning to an HP
9000. They found themselves without their favorite editor, as Quad is
not available on HP-UX. They turned to Qedit, but quickly discovered
that Qedit missed some Quad features. We quickly added
the most urgent of these:
Colcopy and Colmove:
More specifically, they were looking for an easy way to copy or move
columns on a single line, so we just implemented the commands form Quad!
The Merge-justified (MergeJ) command merges the content of a
file with the current workfile horizontally, based on the line numbers by
appending text of the external file to the corresponding line
in the workfile.
Configuring Suprtool for Spectrum
Suprtool operates on the databases that contain your Spectrum application data.
This allows it to know the names of your datasets and fields, the field data types
and size. But it does not allow Suprtool to know everything that would be useful.
For example, the database contains birth-date, name-chg-date, last-stmt-date, etc.,
but Suprtool doesn't know that these are dates, nor how the date is formatted. When Suprtool has that information,
it can do things like this:
>if birth-date >= $date(1980/06/20)
You tell Suprtool that a field contains a date of a certain format using
the Item command.
As on can see, it is easy to configure Suprtool to operate intelligently with
your Spectrum data.
Convert Spectrum Jobs to Use Suprtool
For example, aurdvcu1 is a job
stream that calculate monthend dividends for regular
share accounts.
In August 2001 we converted it from using HP's free QUERY program to using Suprtool.
Here is the original Query section of the job:
!RUN QUERY.PUB.SYS
B=MEMBRS
LOOKUP
5
S=SHARE-FILE
ASSIGN LOCKOPTION=OFF
OUTPUT=LP
F ACCOUNT LT 999999000 AND REST-FLAG-11 LT 80 AND &
REST-FLAG-12 LT 80 AND &
DESC-ABRV="RSV","SSV","CSP","EST","GRD","REP","TST","UTM", &
"NSV","IRA","IRO","IED","SEP","DCP","MTC"
REPORT
NOPAGE
D1,"DIVD",4
D1,ACCOUNT,13
D1,SUFFIX,15
S,SUFFIX
S,ACCOUNT
END
EXIT
!endif
Below is the equivalent Suprtool task, which executes much
more quickly. The Define commands describe the format of the output file, which is
with all fields in DISPLAY format (i.e., ASCII).
The Extract commands move the field values from the database record to
the new output file record. In this case there are no adjustments or
changes to the data, just a simple extract. But with Suprtool there
could be. Notice that we inserted a literal "DIVD" at the start of
each output record.
The Sort commands sort the records by the SUFFIX and ACCOUNT fields.
!run suprtool.pub.robelle
base membrs,5,LOOKUP
get share-file
if ACCOUNT < 999999000 and REST-FLAG-11 < 80 and &
REST-FLAG-12 < 80 and &
DESC-ABRV="RSV","SSV","CSP","EST","GRD","REP","TST","UTM", &
"NSV","IRA","IRO","IED","SEP","DCP","MTC"
sort suffix
sort account
define fld1,1,9,display
define fld2,1,2,display
sort suffix
sort account
extract "DIVD"
extract fld1 = account
extract fld2 = suffix
output qslist
exit
Another Spectrum Example
The amdrfeec a job stream
was
converted in August 2001 from using the PFASTTAG.PGMS.SPECTRUM program to using Suprtool.
The Define commands describe the format of the output file, which is
with all fields in DISPLAY format (i.e., ASCII).
The Extract commands move the field values from the database record to
the new output file record. In this case there are no adjustments or
changes to the data, just a simple extract. But with Suprtool there
could be.
The Sort command sorts the records by the ACC field.
Note: Qedit and Suprtool are trademarks of Robelle Solutions Technology Inc.
Spectrum is a trademark of Fiserv.
