DSXchange

Just worked for an hour trying to diagnose a strange problem where a transformer would not compile, and kept failing with these two errors:

##W IIS-DSEE-TFTM-00012 10:46:02(011) <transform> Error when checking composite operator: The number of reject datasets "0" is less than the number of input datasets "1".
##E IIS-DSEE-TFPS-00027 10:46:02(012) <transform> Error when checking composite operator: Expected an operand; [line 22, character 18].

It was issuing the second error for every single line in the transformer.

Myself and another co-worker looked at it for an hour and kept stripping it apart and it would not compile.

Finally my co-worker figured it out. The link leading into the transformer was called Record and apparently that was triggering some sort of reserved word problem with the compiler.

We changed the link to ln_Record and the transformer compiled...

Posting just in case it saves someone else down the road...

Doh!

In my first Cobol job, I was faced with a long If statement -- 4 pages worth when printed -- which was failing, and no clue where.

I took the printout to a conference room table, used multi-colored pens to carefully chart the various Ifs, Elses and Thens, and after 3 hours was ready to break something.

A colleague came in, looked at it, and found it in 30 seconds: a period embedded in the code which caused the following lines to be skipped.

Raise a toast to needing a genius to see the obvious, and to those who do things to make that necessity happen.

It's often the janitor who can spot the obvious.

(Like leaving the final period off STOP RUN which I did once.)