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Invoking CA7 from the USS command line

PostPosted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 11:21 am
by chrisc
Hi everyone,

First of all, forgive my ignorance with mainframe stuff, I haven't had a lot of experience with them. I am in the integration space rather than MF, so what I know has only been what I picked up along these lines.

Anyway, is there a way to invoke CA7 from the Unix System Services (USS) command line that actually returns the success or failure of that job?

After much experimentation we managed to at least invoke it using the fairly long-winded command:
tso -t "CALL *(u7svc) ''D=HLQ.CA7.TRIGGER.1234''"

(The dataset name is made up, but the principle is the same.)

This passes the U7SVC invocation to the tso command, which does seem to invoke the job as expected. However, it always seems to return a status code of 0 (unless there is a syntax error in the command in which case we get 8), regardless of whether CA7 worked or not. For example, even if we pass in a dataset name that doesn't exist and isn't registered with CA7, it looks like it was successful. Strangely we always get the command echoed back on stderr, even when it does work, but we're ignoring that because it never changes and doesn't seem to actually indicate an error.

Does anybody have any idea how we could find out whether the command worked or not, from the USS command line? Even if it's a second command line we need to run, we really need to be able to detect any errors if they occur.

...

As a way of backgorund, we're running Message Broker on z/OS, hence pretty much the only access we have to TSO or MVS functionality is either the convoluted way through the USS shell or through JZOS (Java for z/OS) libraries running on the Broker. I'm pursuing the the USS path first only because that's what our current design supports. If there are literally no other options, I'll have to pursue the JZOS option further, but I guess that's for another forum.


Thanks
Chris