IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi,

I have a copybook which is getting changed in the middle portion. Previously it had a filler of X(142) in the middle and some fields were following it. Now as part of the new changes, we are use some of the filler space to introduce some new fields which will use 24 bytes of that 142 byte and the Filler will be reduced to 118 Bytes followed by whatever fields that were after that earlier.

I just wanted to know, since we are just using the filler space available in the middle of the copybook and not trying to expand the copybook by adding new fields, do we need to still recompile all the other programs that are using this copybook?

Hello,

Probably not needed. . .

Suggest someone look at the content of files created with this layout - what if some of the filler has been used and not documented in the copybook - i.e. someone else had a requirement and slipped it in)?

Assuming all is well, how is this filler initialized? If any of the unchanged modules move values to these positions it may cause problems for the code that needs to use the newly defined fields