Introduction to EasyTrieve

Introduction

EasyTrieve is an application provided by Computer Associates (CA). Originally used for creating reports, it has extensive file handling capabilities and a range of programming commands which make it ideal for fast development of systems to manipulate relatively small amounts of data. The situation today is that EasyTrieve is used in almost all cases.  Some generic jobs and specialist programming (for example access to DB2 databases) are done using COBOL, usually when EasyTrieve does not have the capability or speed to perform a job to the required level.

Creating An EasyTrieve Member

EasyTrieve statements are normally held in Partitioned Data Sets (PDS) similar to JCL jobs.  It is possible to place the EasyTrieve statements instream in the JCL (see the JCL Training Guide), but this should only be used for very small jobs.  Under ordinary circumstances, EasyTrieve will be written to a separate PDS with a record length of 80.

EasyTrieve commands may be spread over more than one line, the permitted continuation characters are + and -.  These continuation commands should be used to control the layout of the statements to improve readability.

Comments can be added anywhere in the module.  They take up 1 complete line (it is not possible to have a statement and a comment on the same line), and are delimited by a * in column 7.  Blank lines are also acceptable and should be used to increase the readability of the code.