Working with Jobs

Job Properties

To display the properties of a job, right click on the job and select Properties from the popup menu. The Job properties page displays detailed information about the current status of the job.

Job Output

To view job output with ChangeMan ZDD, you must first set up job folders and filters. See Creating a Job Folder.

Note

For server versions prior to SerNet 7.1.1: Normally, output from a batch job cannot be viewed until a job completes execution. To make job output available at the end of a step, rather than at the end of the job:

Specify SPIN=UNALLOC on the DD statement.

Beginning with SerNet 7.1.1, you can browse open SYSOUT data sets. You can monitor job output as it is being written without even waiting for the job step to end.

However, in order to see new lines in a file that is actively being written, you need to close the file and reopen it in your text editor or viewer in order to refresh the contents.

Every job has the following special files:

.SYSOUT.list - Used to access all of the job output as a single file.
.JCL.cntl - Contains the JCL input stream for the job. Requires SerNet 7.1.1+.

Jobs can be canceled, and output requeued or deleted. Right-click a job or spool data set; when the popup menu displays, select ZDD Network and then choose one of the following commands:
Cancel Job
Cancel Job Purge
Delete Output
Requeue Output

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Job Output Properties

To display the properties of a JES spool file (SYSOUT), right-click on the JES spool file and select Properties from the popup menu. The Spool properties page displays detailed information about the print attributes and size of the JES spool file.

Downloading Job Output

You can download JES spool files to a Windows folder using the Download to Windows Folder command.

This command allows you to selectively download portions of a JES spool file. Normal drag and drop operations only allow an entire SYSOUT file to be downloaded. For large listings, this can take a very long time.

Frequently, you want to download only a particular range of lines and not the entire file. Example use cases are a SYSUDUMP file that contains multiple dumps or a large SERRPRINT trace where you want only the output for a certain time range.

You may specify a range of lines when downloading spool files. The starting and ending lines can be specified either using line numbers or using character search string such as “END OF DUMP”. You can even use a combination of line numbers and search strings.

Character search strings are available only on SerNet 7.1.1+ servers. Invoke the Download to Windows Folder function as follows:

Right-click on a JES spool file, or use the right mouse button to drag the spool file and

drop it onto a Windows folder. When the popup menu displays, choose ZDD Network Download to Windows Folder.
Please note that dragging with the left button will always download the entire spool file and no dialog box will be displayed.

The Download JES File dialog box will then display.

Some of the fields on the dialog box are hidden (removed) when those options are not available:

The starting and ending search strings require SerNet 7.1.1+. They are also not available for the composite SYSOUT file, ”.SYSOUT.list”, which combines all of the output into a single file.
The starting line number is not available for the JCL input file, “.JCL.cntl”, nor for the composite SYSOUT file, “.SYSOUT.list”.

"To" Panel

Fields in the To panel are as follows:

Field	Description
Path name	The full path name of the Windows file into which the JES spool file is copied. The default file name is based on the job name, job number, and spool file name. You can use the "..." browse button to browse for the destination.

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"Line Limits" Panel

The Line limits fields are shown below. Line limits are optional, and the default is to retrieve all lines.

Field	Description
Start line	The starting line number. The default is 0, which will start from the beginning of the file. Pressing the up or down arrows will increment or decrement the line number by 1,000. If search strings are also specified, that search does not begin until this line number.
Maximum lines	The maximum number of lines to download. The default is 0, which indicates no limit. Pressing the up or down arrows will increment or decrement the line number by 1,000. The download will always stop after this number of lines, regardless of any ending search string.

"Encoding" Panel

Select one of the following Encoding types for the output Windows file. The default is ASCII, which is correct in most cases.

ASCII
Unicode (UTF-16)
UTF-8

"Search Strings" Panel

Fill in the Search string limits fields as shown below. Search strings are optional, and the default is to retrieve all lines.

Search strings are always case-sensitive. If a starting line number is also specified, the string search does not begin until that line number.

Search strings are available only when connected to a SerNet 7.1.1+ server.

Field	Description
Start string	The starting search string. The download will begin when a line is found containing this string. If the string is not found, no data will be downloaded.
End string	The ending search string. The download will stop when a line is found containing this string. If the string is not found, the remainder of the file will be downloaded

Recently used starting and ending strings can be selected from a drop-down list for ease of use. The download destination defaults to the previously used folder. A browse button (“…”) can be used to select a different folder. The spin buttons for the line-number fields increment by 1,000, rather than by 1, as spin buttons typically do.

Requeue Job Output

To change the output class and destination for held output, right-click on a job or spool file, and select Requeue output from the popup menu. The Requeue Output dialog box will display allowing you to specify the new output class and destination.

Delete Job Output

To delete job output, right-click on a job or spool file, and select Delete output from the popup menu.

Submitting JCL

You can submit JCL from any of the following sources:

A data set, PDS member, or Unix file on the z/OS server
The JCL stream for an existing job, using the .JCL.cntl file.
A file on your local disk drive
A JCL component in a ChangeMan ZMF baseline, promotion, or package library. There are two ways to submit JCL to the server:
From the File Explorer, using ChangeMan ZDD’s Submit JCL command.
From ChangeMan Edit text editor, selecting File | Submit JCL from the menu.

To submit JCL from the File Explorer, right-click the file, data set, member, or component containing the JCL, and choose ZDD Network  Submit JCL from the popup menu. You can select multiple files to submit several jobs at the same time. If you select more than one file, a separate dialog box will display for each one.

The Submit JCL dialog box allows you to edit the JCL before you submit it. You can either discard the changes or save them. Changes can be saved back to the original file, if it is not read-only, or to a different file.

If you wish to save your JCL changes, you must press the Save or Save As button before submitting the job. After you press the Submit button, the dialog will automatically close..

Jobs submitted with the Submit JCL command run under the authority of the logged on user (the owner ID is the same as the logged on user ID).

You can check the "Add notify job step" box to add a notify step to the submitted JCL. The notify job step will send you a message indicating the return codes for the job. Notify messages can either be displayed in a pop-up message box, or viewed later using the ChangeMan ZDD Message Viewer. The display of notify messages can be configured from the Notify page of the ZDD Network properties. For details see Notify Page.

Submitting Jobs with Windows Task Scheduler

You can use the .NET or COM programming interface of ChangeMan ZDD to submit jobs from your own programs and scripts through the Windows Task Scheduler. For example, this would allow you to submit nightly job cycles automatically.

For more information, see “Using Windows Task Scheduler” in the following manuals: ZDD .NET Programming Interface Guide

ZDD COM Programming Interface Guide

Notify Messages

You can receive notify messages when jobs submitted from ChangeMan ZDD complete. Notify messages are written to the Notify message log. At any time, you can view the last 64 messages written to this log by launching the Notify message viewer application that is installed with ChangeMan ZDD: choose Start | Programs | ChangeMan ZDDNotify.

You can also choose to have a message box pop up every time you receive a message.

These options can be configured using the Notify dialog, described in Notify Page.