Someone asked why we had placed the replication tool on the site, we did it just to allow those who need such a tool to have one for free with no strings.. But we can see why it really doesn’t provide much more than using the OS copy tools such as SNDNETF. So we looked at how you could integrate the tools capabilities to provide some kind of automation. The replication of the save file itself is no great feat, but to be able to use it to carry out an overnight transfer may be useful? So here is our take on what you can do with it..
First you need to automate the save of objects to the save file, this is quite simple as you can use the IBM commands to create the save file and save the objects to it. Using the SYNCSAVF command provided is allows you to send the save file to a remote system (multiple calls can send it to multiple systems). This requires simple CL programming to get the objects saved to a save file and replicated to the remote system(s).
The target side needed a method of allowing a program to see when a file had been successfully replicated, the initial version just kept this information to itself, so we added a message to the message queue which states the save file was successfully replicated. Now all you need to do is write a looping program that looks for this message and restores its contents.
We have hundreds of ideas on how to improve it further but don’t have the time to implement. If you use it and find some limitation which you like to see addressed let us know and we will see how we can do it.. time being the only constraint..
Another option would be to share the code? We had looked at open source projects before but no one seemed to be interested, so we dropped the idea..
Chris…