Advanced 250123-1116
PDS2
Thankx for the Memberies
• ADVANCED FILTERING AND EDITING OF DATA SETS AND
MEMBERS
• 1 THESE ROCK FILES ROCK!
• 2 UPLOAD THE ROCKS
• 3 ONTO THE NEXT JOB
• 4 PREDICT THE OUTPUT
• 5 MAKE YOUR OWN DATASET
• 6 CHECK THE OUTPUT
• 7 VALIDATE
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ADVANCED FILTERING AND EDITING OF DATA SETS AND
MEMBERS
The Challenge
In z/OS, data is typically organized in structures called Data Sets.
The concept is similar to the way you use files and folders on your personal computer, with a few very important differences, which you
will learn more about here.
In this challenge, you will perform some basic operations around Datasets and Members, and when you are finished, you’ll run a job to
process some of those dataset members.
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Before You Begin
Make sure your Visual Studio Code environment is all set up and connected to the z/OS system. Other than that, nothing else is required!
Investment
Steps Duration
7 30 minutes
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1 THESE ROCK FILES ROCK!
You are going to experiment with more things to do with PDS library members.
Download the following files associated with this assignment to your computer in a convenient location.
• [Link]
◦ [Link]
▪ [Link]
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2 UPLOAD THE ROCKS
Now upload these files into your dataset collection.
Right-click on the SOURCE dataset and select “Upload member…”.
You should be able to select multiple files, so go ahead and select all of the rocks*.txt files. Remember you may need to refresh the
dataset view before they show up.
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(In the screenshot above, the SOURCE PDS has been added to the list of favorites.)
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3 ONTO THE NEXT JOB
Locate MERGSORT in the [Link] dataset and copy/paste that into your JCL dataset.
NOTE: Each qualifier (the part between the dots) of a dataset name can be 1-8 characters in length, so we sometimes have to get creative
with making names fit into 8 characters.
If you are having trouble copying MERGSORT, check the spelling.
Now open it up and take a look at what is inside.
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Figure out what the JCL code is going to do.
A big hint is that when the JES (Job Entry Subsystem) processor sees &SYSUID., it will substitute in your userid, so &SYSUID..ROCK1
would be interpreted as Zxxxxx.ROCK1.
These variables are known as “Symbolics”, and they come in handy when writing shared JCL scripts where certain values need to change
from user to user, or system to system.
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4 PREDICT THE OUTPUT
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Look at line #8 of the program and notice where it’s putting its output.
Can you guess what the dataset member name will be after the Symbolic substitution takes place?
Now submit the MERGSORT job.
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5 MAKE YOUR OWN DATASET
We have pre-allocated a number of datasets for you, like OUTPUT, INPUT, JCL and PDS; but you can make your own datasets very easily
right through VSCode.
Select the “Create New Data Set” by right-clicking on your connection profile.
Give it a name that starts with your HLQ (your userid), then PDS2, followed by any third qualifier 8 characters or less, that isn’t already
used. For example, [Link] or [Link].
Select in the next step Partitioned Data Set: Default , and finally select Allocate Data Set .
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6 CHECK THE OUTPUT
Refresh the folder view of your OUTPUT dataset.
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Click on the new ROCKSOUT member and observe what the job did with the three input files.
Rename the ROCKSOUT member to PDS2OUT.
Nearly done!
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7 VALIDATE
All done? Think you got this?
Lastly, delete any PDS2.* datasets you created earlier in this challenge.
To finish up this challenge, submit the CHKAPDS2 validation job from [Link].
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ADVANCED DATA SET TIPS AND TRICKS Next up …
To keep things simple, Zowe hides a lot of the complexity behind the creation of data
Make some tacos?
sets and members.
Tend to your rock collection?
In reality, there are many, many different options being selected by default. You can
change these by using the “Zowe-Default-Datasets” options in [Link], with a full The possibilities are endless, but now is a
walkthrough of this and a few other nice tricks described in this article: great time to jump into JCL and learn just
how programs run in z/OS.
How to Automate z/OS Data Set Allocation Using Zowe & JSON
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