OK, I overstated my case. Did not think about SORT. Certainly ISPF cannot handle VBS.
I've long operated on the ROT that you can't do much with SMF data until 'something' converts it to VB, so I have not actually tried standards like IEBGENER or IDCAMS in many a moon. I am curious though as to why 'amazed users' would be interested in VBS data at all. Gil says that FORTRAN can handle VBS. I have never stared down a FORTRAN program in my career; not a likely denizen in business environments. If a JES2 output segment is created with 'VS' attributes, that does not mean that the data on spool actually consists of spanned records. The point of spanning is to manage records that can exceed physical block size, e.g. 32760. SMF can potentially do that because so many records can have unlimited segments. What does physical block size even mean to JES? IIRC the progenitor of modern SDSF--the Interactive Spool Facility (ISF: get it?)--read data directly from spool using the available JES2 interface(s) that eventually disappeared. So did early versions of the venerable QUEUE command. Now SAPI is a fully defined, fully supported API. The SDSF/Rexx interface can be used to write output directly to a data set just as interactive XDC does. No additional programming required. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Elardus Engelbrecht Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2017 12:50 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: IEC141I 013-A8: how to read VS data sets? Jesse 1 Robinson wrote: >Most standard utilities fail when opened to V(B)S records. Please name them. Just so I can shock my amazed users when they complain about reading VBS things... >Only IFASMFDP can read SMF data, and the output from that is ordinary VB. Really? What about DFSORT and its friend ICETOOL? (Shhhhhhhh about RACF Report Writer, because that thing is 'functionally stabilized' some centuries ago... ) I posted a ICETOOL JCL example in IBM-MAIN which reads raw SMF data type 89. Also look at thread 'Re: DFSORT - ICETOOL - Search for text and replace with date' in Sept 2016 where I wrote that ICETOOL can read in raw SMF data. You can write any program reading VBS data. I wrote in IBM-MAIN about analysing SMF 30 using a home grown Assembler program. Oh, zSecure can do that trick too and do that *fast*. >SAPI should be able to handle any spool data set. Yip! This is where SAPI is useful! >OTOH I've never coded anything for SAPI; we use VPS (Levi, Ray, Shoup) to >extract spool data and ship it to network printers. That is if you give VPS ALTER access to the spool contents. I don't like it, but ... >Likewise, SDSF or equivalent ISV product can handle spool data sets whether >created as V or F. As long you re-assemble exits for third party products to read the spool data using the latest JES2 macros. For SDSF or other IBM spool reading products like SMTP or cs-smtp, everything is ready for reading JES2 spool. >SDSF now has a Rexx interface that makes it very usable for processing spool >files. Hmmm, something for me to RTFM, it may comes in handy for some nefarious spool grabbing... ;-D >FWIW it was once possible to utilize JES2 interfaces to read spool data sets >directly. That ability evaporated a long, long time ago. Oh, yes. TSPRINT (now OMCPRINT) could do that. These JES2 changes gave some third party vendors real grey hairs while trying to comply to new JES2 interfaces and macros. For that, I'm gratefully glad I'm not part of "them"... ;-) Groete / Greetings Elardus Engelbrecht ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
