Specify Subtotal Information

On this panel, you enter information that controls the printing of the subtotal on the output report. You will notice that both the control field name and the subtotal field name have been carried over to the top of this screen for your convenience. The following illustration is a sample Specify Subtotal Information panel:

The RESET COUNTER field asks if you want the subtotal counter to be reset to zero when a control change is detected. The answer to this question should usually be yes. If you specify no, the value that is printed on the report will be a running total of the counter and as such will be incremented continually throughout the report. If you use the no option, you should probably include some reference to it being a running total in the title line that you supply.

The EDITING PATTERN TO USE field allows you to tailor the format used when printing the numeric value on the report. In most instances you can accept the default that is shown on the screen, so don't be concerned with this field if you don't understand how editing patterns work. If you are familiar with the editing patterns available in COBOL, this will be easy to recognize (although it really only provides a subset of COBOL's flexibility). The Zs in the pattern indicate suppression of leading zeros. This means if the digit being printed is a leading zero, print a blank instead of 0. The commas are used to help make the output more readable when printing large values, such as 21,882,041. If you don't want the commas to appear in the output, remove them from the edit pattern. The final character, a 9, is used to start what's known as the significance indicator. What this really does is cause the digit to be printed even if it is a leading zero.

If you want to print a blank value instead of a 0 when a counter contains zero, replace the 9 with a Z in the editing pattern. On the other hand, if you want leading zeros to be printed, you can replace the Zs in the pattern with 9s.

The LINES TO SKIP value allows you to specify the number of print lines to skip before printing this subtotal value. The default value of zero will cause the subtotal line to be printed immediately after the preceding print line. You can specify a value from 0 to 9, or an "E" to cause a page eject before printing the value.

The TITLE line is shown with the default that would be printed on the report. You should notice that both the control break field and the counter are mentioned in the default line. Although this is adequate in some reports, it is much nicer to supply a more meaningful title. In the example mentioned earlier, we were sorting by NODE3 primary and VOLSER secondary. We were doing subtotaling of tracks allocated at both levels, and also tracks used at the NODE3 level. If we were now defining the TRKS counter at the NODE3 level, the default title would show: SUBTOTAL FOR TRKS ON CHANGE IN CONTROL FIELD NODE3. A much more meaningful title is: TOTAL TRACKS ALLOCATED TO THIS USER ON ALL VOLUMES. By the same token, when defining the title for TRKS at the VOLSER level, it would be better to override the default with something like: TOTAL NUMBER OF TRACKS ALLOCATED TO THIS USER ON THIS VOLUME.

When you have completed entering the information on the panel, press the <ENTER> key to record the information. If you decide that you don't want to do subtotaling on the field, you can press <END>. In either case you will be returned to panel DMS044I.