Using national groups as elementary items
In most cases, you can use a national group as though it were an elementary data item.
About this task
In
the following example, a national group item, Group-1,
is moved to a national-edited item, Edited-date.
Because Group-1 is treated as an elementary data
item during the move, editing takes place in the receiving data item.
The value in Edited-date after the move is 06/23/2010 in
national characters.
01 Edited-date PIC NN/NN/NNNN USAGE NATIONAL.
01 Group-1 GROUP-USAGE NATIONAL.
02 Month PIC 99 VALUE 06.
02 DayOf PIC 99 VALUE 23.
02 Year PIC 9999 VALUE 2010.
. . .
MOVE Group-1 to Edited-date.
If Group-1 were
instead an alphanumeric group in which each of its subordinate items
had USAGE NATIONAL (specified either explicitly with
a USAGE NATIONAL clause on each elementary item,
or implicitly with a USAGE NATIONAL clause at the
group level), a group move, rather than an elementary move, would
occur. Neither editing nor conversion would take place during the
move. The value in the first eight character positions of Edited-date after
the move would be 06232010 in national characters,
and the value in the remaining two character positions would be 4
bytes of alphanumeric spaces.