I know OTLT is the Evil Undead, but I need that stake...

[MeBuggyYouJane]

to pierce its unholy heart.

I keep getting baited into this thing in CubeLand, and my colleagues do
have something of a point; to wit, if Users are to be empowered to take
responsibility for their data, then they have to be able to maintain the
Allowable Values (the term du jour in CubeLand) for their Fields (old
VSAM folk, my colleagues). I've read a bit here and there that the
"industry" is taken to questioning letting User do this, but my corner
still buys the notion.

I take the position that these are ultimately (check) constraints on
columns somewhere in the tables. So, I've been looking around for some
utilities that do the two operations necessary to quiet my colleagues:

1) a language processor (or language neutral one) that will spit out
html/javascript for screen generation from the catalog on the read side
of things.
and
2) a utility which will allow constraints to be updated by civilians in
a putatively secure way on the write side of things.

I've found nothing on 2), and for 1); Oracle Forms, Rapid SQL (maybe,
not sure), and Hibernated Validator (ditto).

OF is not feasible, given that most of the databases in question live in
z/OS v8, the rest in LUW. Likely ditto for the other two, if they do
what OF does.

Which leaves the question: has anyone seen such? I didn't find any
responses from ibm.com when I went spelunking.

[--CELKO--]

Re: I know OTLT is the Evil Undead, but I need that stake...

>>I was the first on my block to own the book. Rather a good one,actually. <<

My mortgage and my ego both thank you.

>But I didn't see any references to the utilities I'm seeking. Not that I don't want to write them; I just have no patience with string parsing. The OF approach is about what I would expect. It puzzles me that there hasn't been even a commercial product. <<

Since every encoding scheme will have a different set of rules for its
validation, that would be pretty hard. I tell people to go to a
Regular Expression code website and Google around for whatever they
are using -- VIN, ISBN, ISAN, etc. and then cut& past it into the
local dialect version of SIMILAR TO.

Doing a check digit is pretty easy until you get to the dihedral
five. Substring the digits, cast as INTEGER, multiple by the weights,
do the MOD() and see if this expression matches the last digit cast to
INTEGER. A bit long, but easy to code and maintain.