Reporting Facility Rules for Coding › Data Format

Data Format

The Reporting Facility allows you to define and process numeric and alphanumeric data within a program. Follow these guidelines:

• Define numeric fields in an input record area as packed decimal, zoned decimal, or binary. The maximum length for a zoned decimal field is 15 digits. For a packed decimal field, the maximum length is 8 bytes. For a binary field, it is 4 bytes.
• Define numeric fields in the General Storage Area (GSA) as packed decimal only.
• Define GSA fields with an initial value. If you code no initial value, the system automatically sets alphanumeric fields to blanks and numeric fields to zeros.
• Allocate storage to the input record area fields according to the type and precision of the field, but do not give them an initial value. The values of input record area fields are unpredictable prior to the first read of the input file.

Note: Numeric precision is the number of integers and the number of decimals, separated by a decimal point. For alphabetic fields, the precision is the length of the field, in bytes.