IBM Mainframe Forum

Is there a way to use DSORT to sort based on specified values of a field, rather than in ascending or descending order? Say I had a file with records
02Smith
02Johnson
05Davis
06Thompson
02Jones
03Jackson
05Williams
07Newman

and I needed the records with 05 and 06 in the first two bytes to be in the file before all other records. How could I accomplish that?

Yes, you can. Extend your record by another sort key of one byte. Use IFTHEN to set that to 3 for 05's and 06's otherwise 7. Sort on the one-byte then the two-byte. Should give you what you want.

Where you extend the record depends on whether F or V.

I've used 3 and 7 so there is "space" for other future rearrangement Doesn't have to be a numeric value. If you are unclear, please let us know. If you are clear, please post the solution as it may help others with similar requirements.

Thank you! I definitely understand what you are telling me I need to do. I don't have a lot of experience using DSORT with anything other than very elementary sorts and selects, however, so I'm not sure what the syntax would look like for extending a file by a byte using IFTHEN. The file I am using is fixed block. If you have time to post a simple example of extending a record by a byte with an IFTHEN statement, that would be appreciated. In the meantime I will look for examples in this forum and online.

Hello and welcome to the forum,

This previous topic is similar to what you are looking for:
dfsort-icetool-icegener/topic6889.html#p30562

You will be most interested in Frank's solution at the end of the topic.

BryPri55,

Apart from adding an indicator at the end, you can use ALTSEQ which character EBCDIC, with alternate collating sequence, unsigned. This is similar to format CH, but the characters collate according to the ALTSEQ (alternate collating sequence) table in effect. In your case we are dealing with only numbers in first 2 bytes. So we will change the value of 5(X'F5') to A(X'CA') and 6(X'F6') to B(X'CB') and perform the sort. Note that this will only effect the sorting but contents of your records remain the same.

Use the following DFSORT JCL


will produce

Awesome! I was able to produce the results I needed using both methods. Thanks for the great posts.