Reporting Facility Rules for Coding › Data Movement and Alignment

Data Movement and Alignment

The Reporting Facility can effect the movement and reformatting of data based on the internal data representation of the fields involved. It also allows the three types of numeric fields to be completely interchangeable.

Numeric fields of any type can be involved in an arithmetic or movement operation. The Reporting Facility handles all data conversion automatically. The system performs all internal arithmetic operations in packed decimal format and converts the final result to the format of the receiving field just before the operation is complete.

The system automatically aligns numeric fields or constants involved in arithmetic calculations by the decimal point before the operation takes place. It is not necessary to specify fields having equal numbers of integers or decimal places. The Reporting Facility pads or truncates as appropriate.

You can specify alphanumeric data fields with a length of 1 to 256 bytes. Data transfer between alphanumeric fields begins with the leftmost byte and continues until all characters are transferred, or until the last byte of the receiving field is filled.