Tabular Reports › Limit the Contents of a Report › TOP and BOTTOM Operands-Limit Reports

TOP and BOTTOM Operands-Limit Reports

The TOP and BOTTOM operands, like the FOR operand, limit reports organized by identifier to the number of identifiers specified.

However, the TOP and BOTTOM operands save storage because:

• The FOR operand tests identifiers only after all the data has been read and processed.
• The TOP and BOTTOM operands cause the Report Writer to test each record as it is read and discard records that do not qualify.

The TOP and BOTTOM operands are appropriate for ID options with many unique identifiers, such as TRANNUM.

Example: Sample Commands

• The following commands create a report on the five transactions with the highest terminal response times. Processing similar commands using the FOR operand instead of the TOP operand would require much more storage.

  TAB TRANNUM TOP 5 TERM RESP AND TRAN TCPU
  END
  RUN
  

  A report like the following is generated:

    TRAN     TERM     TRAN
   NUMBER    RESP     TCPU
  -------- -------- --------
  0005671   38.82    5.740
  0000276   28.19    0.007
  0000794   24.26    0.059
  0000027   21.65    0.065
  0001157   16.20    0.654
  -------- -------- --------
  SUMMARY   25.56    6.525
  -------- -------- --------
  

• The following commands create a report on the 30 transactions with the shortest lifetimes. The FORMAT variable option is used to increase the number of digits in the output.

  TAB TRANNUM TRAN LIFE FORMAT(N.NNNNNNN) BOTTOM 30
  END
  RUN
  

  A report like the following is generated:

    TRAN        TRAN
   NUMBER       LIFE
  --------    ---------
  0000080     0.0056320
  0000037     0.0058880
  0000775     0.0061440
  .
  .
  .
  0000102     0.0076800
  --------    ---------
  SUMMARY     0.0071680
  --------    ---------