Greater Than/Less Than Searches

The EBCDIC/ASCII sorting inconsistency causes another problem in Configuration Maintenance.  If you wish to search on an option using the greater than (>) or less than (<) operator and the search criteria mixes numeric and alphanumeric characters, the search will return different results on the AS/400 than it will on the PC workstation.  Remember that on the AS/400 letters are sorted before numbers and on the PC workstation letters are sorted after numbers.  For example, suppose you have an option COLOR defined as follows.

Notice that the sorting sequence is different in each situation.  If you wanted to see all the colors that are greater than red, the AS/400 search would return Blue and Green (in order).  The same search on the PC would return Cyan, Gray, Magenta, Yellow, Blue, and Green (in order).

When you are structuring your options and expect to perform greater than and less than searches in both platforms, be sure to consistently name your options and not to mix numeric and alphanumeric characters.  If options are represented with all numeric characters or alphanumeric characters but not both, the search will return the same results regardless of platform.