Invoking REXX thru JCL

Govarthanan · New User Joined: 22 Nov 2013 Posts: 10 Location: India

Hello All,

I am facing a problem with a tool I am developing. Please let me know if there are any other ideas or ways to solve this.

I have a an ISPF program that submits a skeleton JCL which runs a REXX program at the back end.

1. The ISPF prog is as below

Pedro · Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 7:50 pm

Put the parameters in a file and change the rexx program to read the file.

Akatsukami · Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 8:39 pm

As Sr. Vera suggests, you can place the parameters in a data set (or in-stream; ISPF file tailoring will work with in-stream variables). You can also break up your EXEC statement, thus:

Pedro · Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 10:30 pm

sureshpathi10 · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 8:19 am

Mr Pedro,

For me &PARM1, &PARM2, and &PARM3 looks like symbolic parameters.
I doubt that, we can use symbolic parameters within in-stream data. I may be wrong. Could you straighten me up?

My apologies, if this looks silly. But I really need to clarify for my future references.

Nic Clouston · Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 2:42 pm

Presumably your file tailoring is replacing &PARMx so these will actually be data values within the instream data.

Govarthanan · New User Joined: 22 Nov 2013 Posts: 10 Location: India

Thank you Pedro and Akatsukami, but i am sincerely sorry for my silly mistake.
One thing I dint mention earlier was, the parameters are basically queries so they tend to go beyond more than 100 characters, which is a limit in JCL.

So one way is to write in a file and read it in my REXX, is there any other way. Despite my search i found these 2 links nearly suiting my approach.

pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r12/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.zos.r12.ikjc300%2Fikj4c310107.htm
and

stackoverflow.com/questions/1960784/how-to-pass-arguments-to-rexx-program-through-jcl

So what I tried was like below

daveporcelan · Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2014 8:49 pm

I think as though you need a dash after %ALPHA1

Like this:

daveporcelan · Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2014 9:01 pm

One more thing....

I understand English may not be your language, so words like 'bcoz' and 'dint' are not a part of it.

Try using the actual words instead.

Akatsukami · Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:50 am

Oh, "dint" is an English word; it means an indentation, as in "My blow put a large dint in the software engineer's head"

Mickeydusaor · Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 4:14 am

Middle English, short for indenten to make dents in, indent
First Known Use: 14th century

Bill Woodger · Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 5:19 am

By dint of a search engine, another meaning was lost.

Govarthanan · New User Joined: 22 Nov 2013 Posts: 10 Location: India

My sincere apologies Dave, for my English. I promise not to repeat them again.
Thanks for your hyphen (dash) also at the end of line 1, the program read the first parameter, but i am not able to differentiate subsequent parameters. I tried separating parameters with comma , is there something that I am missing

daveporcelan · Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 7:29 pm

I think the issue is that you are trying to pass too much through an input argument.

While each line is a single parameter in YOUR MIND, the Rexx program (which you have not shown us, so I am using my crystal ball), sees PARM1 = SELECT, PARM2 = COL1, PARM3 = FROM etc

I have been coding Rexx since 1989, and I have never tried to pass this much data thru parameters.

If it were me, I would try the example Pedro shows above.
Your ALPHA1 program can use EXECIO to read MYDATA DD into PARM1, PARM2, PARM3.

You can continue to try your way, but better to take advice from those here. Isn't that why you posted in the first place?

Pedro · Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 10:31 pm

Your example is too simple.

My experience with SELECT statements is that they can be quite large. You may want to write some that span many lines. For that reason, I think you need to read the statements from a file rather than as parameters to the exec. The normal delimiter for DB2 is a semicolon (';'). I think you want to read lines from a file until you find the semicolon and then concatenate all of the lines to create the single SELECT statement.

Then, read more lines until you find a semicolon, concatenate those, and so on ...

You may want to handle semicolons that occur within a quoted string... it should not be treated as a delimiter.

Govarthanan · New User Joined: 22 Nov 2013 Posts: 10 Location: India

Thanks Dave and Pedro.
I guess it s better I stick to the file format itself rather than passing.
I will try and let you know people. Thanks all