Ambling round a client's IMS MPP regions the other day I came across a program, essentially an I/O module, that very clearly expects Working-Storage(W-S) to be persistent across tasks (it caches some very high activity data in W-S). Unfortunately W-S isn't persistent any more! I've had a hunt through the documentation and it seems that this was fairly easily achieved using OS/VS COBOL (preload module, NOENDJOB option etc.) and COBOL/2 (LRR runtime option and so forth).
There's almost no mention of a similar capability being available for Enterprise COBOL, though, which seems (to put it mildly) a crying shame - particularly as we now operate in a storage-rich environment. I note that RTEREUS is "not recommended for use under IMS" but no reason is given for that.
So I suppose the crux of the matter is: If support for persistent working-storage is still there, how do I do it; if persistent working-storage is a thing of the past, is there a recognized / recommended alternative technique? For obvious reasons I'd like to keep source-level changes to a minimum, but I'm not above changing things around if I must as this is costing a great deal of money.
I'd greatly appreciate comment on this - working-storage persistence seems so very useful a capability that it's outright bizarre for it to have disappeared.
Thanks in advance!
Pete.