Spool File Format Change

The format of the spool record held in the MVS Spool file, mvsspl01.dat has changed.

After you install COBOL Server, the MVS Spool file conversion is handled automatically. The spool process:

Checks for the presence of an existing mvsspl01.dat file.
If found, automatically converts this file to a new-format mvsspl02.dat
Renames the old mvsspl01.dat file to mvsspl01.R1.

The mvsspl02.dat spool file is used in all subsequent processing.

However, if you revert to a previous release, the new format MVS Spool file records are not readable by an old version of the product. If you revert to a previous release, you can revert the new-format spool file to the old format.

To revert the mvsspl02.dat to mvsspl01.dat:

Backup the existing mvsspl02.dat file.
Set the MFSYSCAT Environment variable to the location of the System Catalog.
Run the MVS Spool convert utility MFSPLRVT.
This utility reads the records in the new format MVS Spool file mvsspl02.dat, converts then to the old format, and writes them to mvsspl01.dat. When this process completes, mvsspl02.dat is renamed to mvsspl02.r2.

When this completes, the MVS Spool file is readable in older versions of COBOL Server.

Example

The following sequence of commands:

set MFSYSCAT=c:\estest\catalog.dat
mfsplrvt

generates the following output:

REVERT SPOOL STARTED
REVERT SPOOL ENDED SUCCESSFULLY

The ctf tracing process has additional tracing functionality added so that information from the conversion is available in the event of problems. To enable this functionality, set the following line in the trace configuration file to enable trace events for both conversions: mvsspl01.dat to mvsspl02.dat and mvsspl02.dat to mvsspl01.dat:

mftrace.comp.mf.mvs.mvsspool#reformat = true