CoSort GUI
Metadata recognition and conversion in the IRI Workbench
Metadata definition
He who with IRI CoSort familiar with, knows that the structure of its sources and destinations in the SortCL Data Definition File (DDF) syntax must be defined. /FIELD definition is traditionally a manual discovery and specification process or the result of a command-line conversion program such as cob2ddf (for COBOL copybooks).
Today, the IRI Workbench automatically creates source metadata in reusable DDFs. The Metadata Discovery wizard automatically analyzes database tables and delimited files to generate the DDF.
Users with fixed or unspecified sequential data can visually define their source layouts. Sliders visually analyze the fields, and the wizard automatically creates the metadata.
The following screenshot shows how to define fixed-position fields by going to the beginning and end of each field in a source data preview window. When you add a field, the bottom spreadsheet view reflects the DDF specifications (which you can then modify).
For datasets with delimited fields, a column-based editor is offered instead, since sliders are not required. A HEX view option facilitates the definition of binary data.
Metadata conversion
The migration of existing data descriptions into CoSort SortCL Data Definition File (.DDF) repositories is now also done automatically. The Metadata conversion assistant In IRI Workbench, you analyze CSV, CLF, LDIF, XML, and other delimited files and create DDF files with the corresponding /FIELD statements. The same wizard can also convert third-party metadata repositories such as COBOL Copybooks and SQL Loader Control Files into SortCL DDF.
There is also a wizard for converting and importing third-party sorts (e.g., JCL sort parameters for z/OS MVS or VSE) into SortCL job scripts.
