Your housekeeping policy may result in a large number of archived spool files, located in different folders, that you must retain for audit trail purposes. It is possible to view the job details and file contents in each of those separate archive folders, but not all together.
These separate archives may be merged together into a central location through use of the Merge Archives process. This copies the archived spool files and merges them into a new, combined, archive. It does not change the original archive, so the audit trail remains untouched, but the combined archive allows viewing of all the jobs that have been merged. The combined files have similar names to the original spool control files but are prefixed with 'M_'. Opening M_SPLJOB.DAT in the Micro Focus Data File Editor allows you to view all the jobs and job details.
You run the merge process in one of two ways: submitting a JCL job, or by running a command line utility. Both the sample JCL (MERGESPL.JCL) and the command line utility (MergeArchives.exe) are shipped with Enterprise Developer.