In this assignment you will use COBOL's Sort and Merge features and the Copy verb.

John Drummer, a marketing specialist, maintains contacts with many people: friends, relatives and business contacts. Among other things, he sends out many birthday cards in the course of each year. At the moment, he has 3 files of data about people and their birthdays. He needs to have them sorted and merged into one large file, and he also wants to be able to produce a list of people with birthdays in a given range of months.

Input files

File A has data set name KC02314.SUMMER09.CSCI465.HW7.A, and it is catalogued. It contains 2 header records followed by approximately 23 records having the following format:

• First name (15 characters)
• Last name (15 characters)
• Birthdate (8 digits in in YYYYMMDD format)
• Connection (1 character = 'R' for relative, 'B' for business, or 'F' for friend)

File B has data set name KC02314.SUMMER09.CSCI465.HW7.B, and it is catalogued. It contains 3 header records followed by approximately 32 records having the following format:

• Last name (15 characters)
• First name (12 characters)
• Birthdate (6 digits in in DDMMYY format)

File C has data set name KC02314.SUMMER09.CSCI465.HW7.C, and it is catalogued. It contain 1 header record followed by approximately 23 records having the following format:

• Last name (18 characters)
• Birthdate:
  • Month name (9 characters)
  • Day (2 digits)
  • Year (4 digits)
• First name (15 characters)
• Connection (1 character = 'R' for relative, 'B' for business, or 'F' for friend)

You should use the Copy verb to obtain the record descriptions for File B and File C. The record descriptions are in members named FILEB and FILEC in a catalogued PDS with data set name KC02314.SUMMER09.CSCI465.HW7.COPYLIB.

Steps in the JCL

First, use DFSORT to sort File A in ascending order on Last Name (first key), First Name (second key) and Birthdate (3rd key). Be sure to provided the estimated file size for DFSORT.

Second, write your own JCL to use the compiler and loader for your COBOL program.

COBOL Program

Use the Sort verb to sort File B in ascending order on the same 3 keys. Use an input procedure to convert the records into the File A format. You will need to supply the first 2 digits in the year. You may assume all the years involved are after 1914. Use an output procedure to supply the Connection field, which should be 'B' for all records in File B.

Use the Sort verb to sort File C in ascending order on the same 3 fields. You will need to use an input procedure to convert the date to the format used in File A. (In theory, this could truncate some names. Ignore this possibility.)

Now use COBOL's Merge verb to combine the 3 files using the same 3 keys. Use an output procedure to eliminate duplicates. If two or more records have the same keys but have different Connections, combine them:

• if the Connection values are 'F' and anything else, use 'F'
• if the Connection values are 'R' and 'B', use 'R'

Extract all records for which the Birthdates are in the desired months (of any year) and write them into a separate file. (See the Programming Notes section.) You should count the extracted records.

Print the contents of the merged file in a neat report. The report should have a page heading including the date and a page number, as well as column headings. Double-space between detail lines. Center your output on the page. All dates should be spelled out using the name of the month, as in "23 August 2001" or "14 May 1997". (Put these together with the String statement.) The Connection field should be spelled out as "Relative", "Business", or "Friend". Print no more than 50 lines per page.

Last, sort the contents of the extract file in ascending order by Birthdate and use an output procedure to print the results in a second neat report. You can use the same format but use a different page heading. Indicate somewhere at the top of the page what months were used in extracting records. There is no need to write the sorted records from the extract file into a separate file.

Programming Notes

• Use the Accept verb to obtain the date from the system.

• You should copy a table of month names into your program using the copy verb. It is in a member named MONTHS of the same copy library.

• You may print the first report from the output procedure for the Merge if you wish.

• Use the Sort-File-Size special register to inform COBOL of the estimated size of each file. You will need to count the extracted records to provide an estimate for the size of the extract file.

• Check COBOL's special register SORT-RETURN after each Sort or Merge call. If it does not contain 0, DISPLAY an appropriate error message.

• We do not want to include any of the header records in the sorting and merging.

• Expect compiler warnings in this program (i.e., return code of 4 from the compiler).

• All of the files generated in this job (the sorted and merged files and the extract file) can be temporary files.

• Pass an EXEC-line parameter to your program. The parameter should contain 2 numbers of 2 digits each, indicating which months should be used in extracting records. That is, if we want to extract records for months August through October, we would use PARM='08,10'. If we want to extract records for months November through February, we would use PARM='11,02'. (Thus you will want to consider which number is larger.) You should validate the PARM string. If it is not valid, terminate the program with a return code of 99 and do nothing more.

• The actual value to use for the PARM will be announced.

• Provide a return code = 0 when your program terminates normally.