Fujitsu PowerBSORT for Windows

The following sequence of screen captures lets you see the features of PowerBSORT at work. The screen captures are taken from PowerBSORT's interactive interface supplied with the Enterprise Edition of NetCOBOL (previously called Fujitsu COBOL); you can of course call PowerBSORT directly from your programs without going through the interactive interface.

PowerBSORT's Interactive Interface
Sorting
Specifying Key Fields
Range of Key Field Types
Summing

PowerBSORT's Interactive Interface

PowerBSORT provides a handy interactive interface for performing file sorts and merges. This can be useful for one-off operations, or for checking sort parameters before cementing them in your code.

Sorting

With PowerBSORT's interactive interface sorting is straightforward and fast: specify the file to be sorted with its format, the output file with format, the key field and record length, and away you go! The "View" buttons take you to dialogs to help you select files or setup the key fields.

Specifying Key Fields

Key field specification couldn't be easier. PowerBSORT gives you a preview of the records. You can either enter the key field offset and length or select the appropriate area in the record contents window.

Range of Key Field Types

PowerBSORT can cope with many types of keys - simply select the type from the pull-down list.

Summing

One of PowerBSORT's useful extra features is the ability to sum particular fields for records that have identical keys. For example you may want to combine all sales records for a region into a single record with the total figure for all the sales - this is a quick and easy operation with PowerBSORT. It can be performed at the same time as sorting or merging files. Other "extras" are the ability to select which records to include in the output file, and to construct output records from a mixture of input record fields and data you specify.