Handling DMSII GROUPs

A GROUP is a DMSII construct that allows the data items that belong to the group to be referenced at one time (for example, as one item). The concept of GROUP does not exist in a relational database. Therefore, if the DMSII database you replicate has one or more GROUPs, the DATABridge Client ignores the GROUP name and instead treats each item within the GROUP as a regular data item. All items in a DMSII GROUP share the same parent item number, which is the item number of the GROUP item.

Following is an example of the DMSII GROUP item in the data set called ADDRESS. This GROUP item consists of the data item CITY and the data item STATE.

DMSII DASDL Showing GROUP

The following is an excerpt from a DMSII DASDL that shows how a GROUP item is defined. With the GROUP item, you can access both city and state with one reference.

ADDRESS DATA SET
(
STREET ALPHA (20);
APARTMENT ALPHA (5);
CITY-STATE GROUP
(
CITY ALPHA (20);
STATE ALPHA (2);
);
COUNTRY ALPHA (20);
ZIPCODE NUMBER (5);
POSTFIX NUMBER (4);
);

The next example shows how the same DMSII GROUP item is mapped to a relational database.

Relational Database Table

The following example is for Microsoft SQL Server.

The table name is the lowercase form of the DMSII data set name. The GROUP item CITY-STATE is ignored. The data items in that group are included in the relational database table as if they were ordinary DMSII data items.

address (table name)

street       apartment    city       state       country   zipcode  postfix

May St.      3            Paris      OH          USA       15010    2146
Elm Ln.                   River      SD          USA       24906    3381

If there are duplicate names among members of various groups within a data set, the DATABridge Client resolves the conflict by appending a digit to the column name to make it unique.