ASAM I/O area

An application program must identify an I/O area to contain the segments to read from or write to the ASAM data set. The format of this I/O area is the same as an IMS GSAM I/O area:

  • If the record format is variable, the first two positions of the I/O area contain the length of the record.
  • If the data set contains control characters, the first position contains the control character for fixed and undefined record types and the third position contains the control character for variable record formats.

The length of the rest of the ASAM I/O area depends on the length of the data to store in (or retrieve from) the ASAM data set.

Define the ASAM I/O area as a level 01 entry in working storage. You can further define the area with level 02 entries. The following example shows a typical ASAM I/O area in COBOL. The area contains three character-type fields (4 bytes, 16 bytes, and 32 bytes, respectively):

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
...
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01   ASAMAREA.
     02 ASAMFLD1 PICTURE X(4).
     02 ASAMFLD2 PICTURE X(16).
     02 ASAMFLD3 PICTURE X(32).

 

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