I submitted a request for this improvement in 2004, first as DAR 13394592-2 and then again to the Testing Tools User Community "Suggestion Box".
We were told that CA is converting the DARs to Ideas, and we don't need to resubmit them. (Which would be difficult, because it no longer appears in a View Cases search.)
For the record what I submitted was:
When debugging assembler programs in CA-InterTest Batch, it only displays data fields as Hex. It is not using the actual field type to format the display. This occurs throughout the product; including the KEEP, DISPLAY and D, K line commands.
For example, given the following line from an assembler program:
0009D0 D207 DF44 E028 00FFC 00028 1078 MVC RPVIMPSB,INQEPSB
and both fields are DS CL8
an Autokeep window displays:
18CFFF64 HX 000000 02 R13!+F44 0000000000000000
18CFFBD0 HX 000000 02 R14!+28 E6C9D4E7F5F3F0F0
There are two problems:
- When a Keep is done implicitly or explicitly on a data name, the data name should should be displayed in the keep line. Otherwise the programmer doesn't know what data the keep line is for. (Note that the data name may also have an offset. For example, if the code was MVC RPVIMPSB+5,INQEPSB then the offset would need to be displayed in the keep line.
- Keeps and Displays should format the data according to the type of data name. For example,
DS/DC Format as
A address
B bit string
C character string
X hex
F binary fullword
H binary halfword
P packed decimal
etc.
(The binary and packed numbers should format as their decimal values, just as InterTest does for COBOL data items.)
If the programmer needs to see the actual hex contents of the field, they can do the Hex display command.