The $ORTPARM DD facility is particularly useful for COBOL sorts requiring century window processing of year data with MFX’s year data formats. The year data formats are not supported by COBOL. Therefore, when a data format specification needs to be changed for century window processing, it is necessary to override SORT control statements generated by COBOL. The override can be accomplished with a $ORTPARM DD statement. The following example shows a $ORTPARM DD used for this purpose.
In this example, the 2-digit year field (10,2) will have century window processing applied to it via the Y2Z year data format and the CENTWIN option.
As described in the previous section, multiple sort invocations by the same COBOL program would require multiple $ORTPARM DD statements, each with the FREE=CLOSE parameter.