Define and Maintain the Workload Best Practices › Calendars and RESOLV › Create Calendars

Create Calendars

Use online or perpetual calendars. Base calendars are required for schedule resolution and can be generated through either batch or online facilities or self generated as perpetual calendars. We recommend using online or perpetual calendars. To use the online facility or perpetual calendars (DB.2.8), allocate a calendar PDS, and identify it in the initialization file with a CALENDAR statement.

The CALENDAR macro can also generate calendars in batch. Macro keywords are used for calendar definition, and the macro is assembled and link-edited using standard procedures.

Starting with r11.3, you can use perpetual calendars that are self-generating. When using perpetual calendars, you do not have to build new calendars each year manually. Perpetual calendars let you define calendars one time without regards to the year and have CA WA CA 7 Edition automatically build each new year’s calendar.

Business Value:

Seamless processing with calendars is always available.

Additional Information:

To implement perpetual calendars, add PCALDSN on the CALENDAR statement in the initialization file. Next, define generic days in the PDS as a member with name PCALYYxx where the xx associates this PCAL member with a specific SCALyyxx (yy is the current year). When the calendar is next referenced (with CALMOD, RESOLV, or PRINT commands) and no SCALyyxx member exists, one is built from PCALYYxx definition. Perpetual calendars support criteria language in the PCALYYxx member to set relative days, define US holidays, and you can define unique, specific days—with any of these set to SCHDAYS or NOSCHDY.

If you are using nonperpetual calendars, the next year calendar is typically available by July 1 of the current year.

However they are created, calendars are stored in the form of bit masks that represent available and unavailable processing days for the year. Each calendar defines a single year comprising 12 months with a starting and ending year boundary that is crossed only in the first or 12th month.

Use the PRINT command to produce a month-by-month listing of a calendar. PRINT produces output that reflects the beginning and ending days of each month, holidays, or any other nonprocessing days that were defined when the calendar was created.

Resolve the schedule at the following times:

• Whenever a calendar-oriented processing schedule expires (at the end of June or the end of the year).
• The scheduling frequency is redefined for any other reason.