[Info-vax] Streaming a File on OpenVMS with Caché

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <bd6e7824-f4c1-4856-b4e8-0d60e6e7af3d at googlegroups.com>,
	Steven Schweda <sms.antinode at gmail.com> writes:
>> Seems to me there is.  The recieving end has a program
>> that, obviously, expects a particular input.  Tell the
>> sending side(s) the format that the data needs to be in and
>> don't accept anything else.
> 
>    I love your customer orientation, 

I am very customer oriented (you should try working with the datacenter
here!!) but reality is reality.

>                                      but please explain how a
> remote user on a non-VMS system can determine the record
> format of a file when it arrives at (or is reconstituted on)
> the VMS system.

If you tell him the format it needs to be in and how to transfer it so that
it will not get changed along the way you won't have to "reconstitute" it.

Now, we really haven't been told just what the data is so this is really
all just academic.  But in cases like this the best bet is to make the
data an human readable, ASCII text file and the use ASCII mode in FTP
to transfer it.  That will even work on VMS. :-)  

> 
>> [...] the only way [...]
> 
>    In my experience, statements like that are practically
> always wrong.

You must not work with real users much.  I used to get classlists from
the faculty for the creation of accounts.  Supposedly, they all used
the same function from a web page to get their classlists.  And yet,
with 10 faculty members I got classlists in 7 totally different formats
in many cases not even containing the same fields.  As you might imagine,
this made automating the process of adding new users somewhat problematic.
The solution was, as stated, to get the list of new students all in one
format (in my case CSV) in a single file, in a specified layout.  Has
worked find ever since!!

bill


-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>