Download Infopac report from IBM Mainframe to a text file?

[zoemost]

Hi,

The company I work for uses an IBM mainframe is the backbone of many of its systems. Within the InfoPac section, there's a report that I'd like to be able to download to a text file, mainly because I need to do some analysis on the contents of the report, and this is the only source of this information that I've been able to find. Obviously, the data is available somewhere or else it couldn't create the report, but the reality is that JCL/Mainframe coding resources are very limited so I have basically no hope of getting someone assigned to create me a daily extract of the data. I was hoping to be able to use VC to download this report every day (it generates several times a day - I need all versions). Once I have it in a text file, I can scrub that file to convert it into a format that's easily importable into something like Excel or Access so I can do my analysis.

I didn't see a task type in VC that looks like it'd let me connect to a mainframe. I could probably string together a bunch of tasks, something like "first, run this tn3270 emulator exe file; when you get to this screen, enter the username here and the password here and hit enter; when you get to this next screen, choose option 2; when you get to this next screen, enter report id <blah>; etc etc", but it seems like that'd be incredibly prone to failure.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might do this?

[nicc]

I don't know what 'VC' is but why not simply FTP the report dataset or, at least, get someone to set it up for you and get it scheduled to run when the report is created? They may even be able to transfer the data dataset instead of the report dataset. If there is an approved reqirement then the resources should be allocated including the resource to get the data to you.

[Robert Sample]

Infopac is a product from an ISV (independent software vendor). Your ABSOLUTELY BEST chance of getting what you want done is to work with the vendor's support team. They know the product a lot better than anyone here. And if your organization is licensed for the product, you are entitled to support from the vendor. I don't believe there is a lot of use of Infopac by users of this forum -- I've heard of the product a time or two, but I've never worked at a site that had it installed. Hence the chances of you getting much help on this forum is pretty small -- and much smaller than if you contact the vendor support team!