Getting Started with TRANSACT (32247-90007)

Chapter 8 123
Special Topics
Interface to Report/V
The Transact program extracts the data desired and writes it to an MPE file called
shortage. When it is finished, it calls the report program in line 21.
That's all there is to it. There is a similar interface between Transact and Inform. If the
report were defined using Inform, line 21 would become:
call ex65r,inform;
The example above took advantage of Dictionary/V by defining the file shortage in the
dictionary. When interfacing with Report/V, the file does not have to be defined in the
dictionary nor do the data elements that are contained in the file have to be defined in the
dictionary.
We have already seen how to use Transact without the dictionary. If the data items were
defined in the dictionary, but the file was not, there would not be any changes required to
run the above program.
If the data items were not defined in the dictionary, then the report program would have to
contain the item definitions using DEFINE(ITEM). The resulting Report/V program is
shown below.