Just wanted to ask some of you WebFOCUS experts (I hope to be one when I grow up :] .....) a question that was recently posed to me. I think I answered correctly but wanted to make sure.

Someone in my company has a FOCUS application that resides on a mainframe. This app updates, deletes, and modifies a Focus db. Reporting is also done. The question was "Can WebFOCUS access a FOCUS db on a mainframe?" He wants to create a WebFOCUS front-end to a mainframe FOCUS db. This person is not familiar with WebFOCUS.

This seems like something that would need to be converted to a MAINTAIN app on a WF server. I'm not real familiar with MAINTAIN nor MODIFY. Most of what I do is for reporting purposes. As far as I know you cannot run against or connect WF to a mainframe FOCUS db or mainframe flatfiles. They would have to be moved to a WF server (or a server with WF loaded on it).

Thoughts?

thanks so much,
Alan

I have never used webfocus to update mainframe databases, but we use webfocus to report regularly off of mainframe databases.

You can access FOCUS DB or mainframe flat files as long as you a iWay server and adapters.

Alan :
If you have the right kind of iWay connectors, you should be able to run reports against all kinds of mainframe files. We report from Flat files, GDGs, DB2 & VSAM on the mainframe from the WebFOCUS MRE.

In our case, it helps that the EDA engine itself is on the mainframe while the WF Client is on a Windows server. If your entire WF setup is on the windows side and you do not have a connection to the mainframe, I guess you will have to buy that connector to be able to use your legacy FOCUS apps / databases from WebFOCUS. But it is certainly possible. You might even talk to your account rep. to clarify your licensing program.

Hope that helps.
Sandeep Mamidenna.

In a hub/sub environment, you can update mainframe databases using WebFOCUS. The edaserver would be on the sub server, which is the mainframe. The WebFOCUS reporting server is on the server(hub).

All of our databases, which are FOCUS, are on the mainframe. The WebFOCUS Maintain apps (.mnt files) are on the server, but the programs they execute are on the mainframe. The executed programs can probably be on the server too, but we chose to keep them on the mainframe.

Some of my WebFOCUS Maintain apps execute mainframe Maintain add, update and delete fexs. Some of my WebFOCUS Maintain apps execute mainframe Modify update fexs. I use Modify, instead of Maintain if I'm updating a large number of records. Some of the applications, which update the mainframe databases use WebFOCUS to run a mainframe Modify fex, but don't use WebFOCUS Maintain. Instead, I have a HTML/Javascript front end, which just passes the parameters to the fex, which sits on the mainframe. We're on VM so I don't have to deal with JCL anymore, (insert a huge smiley here), but you can also use WebFOCUS to kick off a MVS mainframe FOCUS batch job which can run immediately or delayed, depending on the JCL CLASS card. This way avoids the EDASERVER and is great for long running fexs or resource hog fexs which run against huge data bases.

In our environment we can run mainframe FOCUS fexs without using WebFOCUS, since we have a Mainframe webserver besides WebFOCUS too, but it requires me to write CGI apps to execute the programs. Using WebFOCUS I no longer have to write CGI apps, which is a huge time saver.

Sue

As Sue points out, Maintain gives you the ability to update databases anywhere on your enterprise.

Maintain allows for distributed processing. You can place small Maintain procedures on your Mainframe server (ie MVS) that retrieve the data and pass it to the application running on the web. Once the data is changed, you can then pass it back to another Maintain procedure on the server and have that update the database. This is done with the CALL command.

You can even use your existing Table procedures to collect the data on the server and send it back to the Maintain procedure. This is done with EXEC.

This type of application design gives you all the power and flexibility of the Maintain language and forms, but keeps all data on the servers.

Mark Derwin

So much to learn !! Thank you all. That certainly answers my question.

When we converted from FOCUS on our mainframe to WebFOCUS, all FOCUS databases and flatfiles we were using were moved off the mainframe. My understanding was that this was due to the inability to "access" these files. Obviously not the case. We do have access to the DB2 tables on the mainframe though.

Now I have to go correct myself. Thanks all. Excellent forum.

Alan