ERDS Handling on XA and ESA

Be very cautious when doing any file manipulations to XAEREPIO RECORD or XAEREPMC RECORD, the two files that XA and ESA build onto the EREP user ID’s A-disk. You may prevent EREP from properly accessing these files. To EREP, there is no difference between these two files and the system-owned ERDS of VM SP. But these are files on a disk and the normal file handling operations can be performed upon them.

The following are some of the commonly attempted file manipulations:

Changing the FILEDEF statements for ACCIN to point to the XAEREPIO or XAEREPMC RECORD files
Changing the name of the XAEREPIO or XAEREPMC files to another name and accessing the files as ACCIN
Copying the records from XAEREPIO or XAEREPMC directly to tape without running EREP against the data first
Doing a SENDFILE of the XAEREPIO or XAEREPMC files to another system and trying to concatenate them with the other system’s history data

The VM system will allow these manipulations, but the resulting problems will only occur when you try to run EREP reports using the files.

There is a two byte length indicator in the first two bytes of each of the records in ERDS. EREP processing strips the length indicator bytes off each record, and places the remaining bytes in the ACCDEV file. EREP expects the records to be in this modified format when the file is designated as the ACCIN. If you bypass the EREP file processing and do not make the required modifications EREP issues a IFC1201 message indicating that no records passed filtering in the TOURIST output.