Exporting files from IBM mainframe to Excel - possible?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to check the times reports run in mainframe and export the data from mainframe (job name and time the job completed) to Excel? In mainframe it's fairly easy to set up a macro to check the job, but can't work out how to export it to excel. Tried using VuGen but i don't have a protocol that'll work.

Not sure if it's possible to do this, and even i could find out if it's not possible that'd be good enough for me!

TIA

Damo

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Anything is possible if you spend enough time on it.

We would need some more details to say how to do it.

You say 'IBM mainframe' - model? Model of terminal? It is networked?

Harry.

 

It certainly is possible, but could take ages. I've reverse engineered files to work on different systems that they were originally incompatible with and it takes bloody ages!

Unless you can find a readily available tool I'd assume not.

 

Should be easy if you're any good at coding or scripting. You just need to write a program to get the data and write it to a file which could be a csv file for excel which is very simple.

The exact approach will depend on the situation, you could make it a standalone app that just generates csv's and then use removable media or FTP etc to move the files or you could write a network aware app with sockets or web services.

How you get the report data again depends, it might be in a database, or a file or might be a system call or launching a process and piping the output to a file etc. You may have little/big endian issues or file format or character encoding issues depending on the mainframe and your approach.

Most things are possible in programming with enough time and effort, alternatively you could look for an EDI tool that does the job.

 

Bit of an update - could get it to work partially with VuGen using the RTE option but it would only capture the data once. I couldn't repeat it as the script wouldn't record the "send to" option.

Looks like it'll have to be done using PL/1.

Cheers for the advice anyways guys,
D