Hi,
The company I work for uses an IBM mainframe is the backbone to 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?
Thanks.