Data Views

Restriction: This topic applies only when the AppMaster Builder AddPack has been installed, and applies only to Windows platforms.

Note: AppMaster Builder Data View functionality is available only from the AppMaster Builder perspective, and not from the Team Developer perspective.

A Data View in AppMaster Builder supplies information about your database definitions in a format that can be used by the AMB precompiler and subsequently used by AMB programs. Data views are defined using native data sources and Database Definition Interface (DDI) files.

Supported database types

The AMB data views feature supports the following database types:

IMS
VSAM
SQL DB2

Data views functionality

The following list highlights some of the AMB data views functionality:

Combine database types: Each data view you define can include sources for one or more database types. For example, if your application accesses information in both VSAM files and SQL databases, you can create one data view that contains the record information for both.
Import data views: If you have generated data views using previous versions of AppMaster Builder or using APS for z/OS, you can import those data views into your current version of AppMaster Builder using the Data View Importer.
Generate data views: After adding a data view and defining it with data sources, you then generate the data view to create a DDI symbols file. AMB consults DDI symbols files when generating programs and applications that include database calls that reference data views.
In addition, you can configure AppMaster Builder to simultaneously copy IMS sources to an Eclipse Mainframe COBOL project when you generate a data view.
Access SQL DB2 directly from the mainframe catalog: Once you have added SQL DDL source to a data view, either directly or via a SQL Schema, you have the option to substitute the current mainframe versions of the SQL tables and views in the mainframe DB2 catalog for the tables and views defined in the local SQL DDL. The advantage of using DB2 catalog objects over local data sources is that DB2 catalog objects are much more likely to be up to date than local SQL DDL source.