Extending the Number of Internal Items

ACR/Summary uses internal items to store control values extracted from a balancing job or control values that result from the manipulation of item values in a calculated item. For releases prior to 4.0, a job can have up to 100 internal items. Beginning with release 4.0, the system allows extended internal items, which can store lengthy extracted values. In addition to the 100 internal items, a job can have up to 100 extended internal items.

Problem

You need more than the 100 internal items allowed by the system.

Solution

Three possible solutions can effectively extend the number of internal items allowed.

Use Extended Internal Items
For releases 4.0 and above, a user can use extended internal items to hold smaller values as well as lengthy values. This increases the available number of internal items to 200.

Use Qualifiers
A qualifier represents multiple invocations of the same job/step combination or multiple processing of the same input file during a single balancing run. After the initial job/step runs, the system runs the qualifier or qualifiers. The addition of a qualifier can give you an additional set of internal items.

Example
If you add a qualifier of 01 to a job step called MYJOB/MYSTEP, you have two sets of rules in your definition database :

- MYJOB MYSTEP
- MYJOB MYSTEP 01

When you execute the job in batch mode, the system executes both the blank qualifier and the 01 qualifier. Thus, you have 100 internal items available for each set of rules. For more information about qualifiers, see the ACR/Summary User Guide.

Use ACR/Detail
You can use ACR/Detail to assign keys or to use static keys. For more information about using keys, see the ACR/Detail User Guide.

Assign Keys
Use this solution if you need more than 100 items in ACR/Summary to repeatedly extract a similar value for different areas. For example, you need to extract counts and amount total values for each company department. In ACR/Detail, each key has its own set of internal items. Therefore, each key can have its own unique count and amount total. You can use the different departments for the key fields, then extract the count and amount total one time for each key.

Use a Static Key
If you do not repeatedly extract a similar value for different areas, but you can extract with access mode 6 or 7, you can still use this solution in ACR/Detail. Set a key to a literal value and extract as you would in ACR/Summary. In ACR/Detail you can use up to 999 internal items for each reconciliation job.