Producing Reports › Designing Your Own Reports › Building a Control File › Step 3 - Define a Time Period

Step 3 - Define a Time Period

Set up date comparisons to tell GRW that you want tapes to expire in the next 7 days. Add this COMPUTE statement to your control file:

COMPUTE ENDDATE AS P5JULIAN PLUS ‘7’ DISPLAY ‘9999999’.

Because you want to report on tapes that are due to expire in a week, you can calculate the ending date for the report by adding seven days to today’s date. GRW stores today’s date in Julian date format (that is, yyyyddd) in a variable called P5JULIAN. The COMPUTE statement shown above adds 7 to the value stored in the P5JULIAN variable and places the result in a variable called ENDDATE.

DISPLAY ‘9999999’ tells GRW that the data in the column will be a seven-digit whole number.

Note: Because the P5JULIAN variable used in the COMPUTE statement above stores the date in Julian date format, producing the example report during the last week of the year would make the ddd portion of ENDDATE greater than 365, which is invalid. If you want to produce a similar report that can be run all year round, use the sample control file named TMCRPT3 VMRGRW that was loaded from your distribution media.