OCCURS DEPENDING ON

DMSII uses the DEPENDING ON clause (usually with COMPACT data sets) to conserve disk space. For COMPACT data sets, the DMSII work area always contains a fully expanded version of the record; however, the record is compacted when it is stored on disk. The exact syntax for OCCURS DEPENDING ON clause is as follows:

item_name OCCURS n TIMES DEPENDING ON depends_item_name;

The value (n) defines the maximum number of occurrences of the data item (item_name), while the value of the depends item (depends_item_name) controls the number of occurrences of the item that are stored. This last number cannot exceed n. Information on an OCCURS DEPENDING ON clause is relayed to the DATABridge Client, enabling the DATABridge Client to suppress extraneous columns that do not actually exist. If the DEPENDS data item has a value of 3, and the OCCURS clause is OCCURS 10 TIMES, the last 7 columns are not included.