KR edition 207 - 208

KR-207* PrintScreen in Mainframes and Subcommands
Hi everyone,
Don’t you think it will be interesting to have a screen capture command in Mainframes?! Well, we do have! Didn’t know? Here is how to do it.

PrintScreen in Mainframes, and Subcommands:

• In DSLIST (ISPF 3.4), give the command LIST or L, in the ‘Command’ area (as we did in KR 206), infront of the pds or flat file of which you want a snap shot. If it is a PDS, you have to give the member name also.

• Alternatively, you can also issue the LIST or L command from the READY prompt (the prompt you get when all the screens are closed).

• The LIST command displays the content of the file. Here you can issue a variety of ‘Subcommands’ that do not work in the normal View/Edit/Browse modes.

• Issue the command SNAP here to get a snapshot what is being displayed in the screen. The “snapshot” will be stored in the data set <USERID>.AS1500.SCREEN. You can give additional operands with the Snap command. The complete Syntax is:

SNAP TITLE('character-string') EJECT/NOEJECT HEADER/NOHEADER ON/OFF

where TITLE('character-string') specifies a character string that is to printed in the snapshot, as a label or identification.

HEADER: Includes the top four lines of header information in the output. HEADER is the default.

NOHEADER: Excludes the top four lines of header information in the output.

• You can find explanation about the other parameters as well as all the ‘Subcommands’ that can be entered by pressing the F1.

• Some of the interesting ‘Subcommands’ available are: CRUNCH (invokes the "crunched" display which replaces any string of four or more blanks,dashes, or asterisks with a four-character string), COL (displays data only from the specified column ranges), RECALL (displays the "n"th previous subcommand string displayed on the subcommand entry), REPEAT (repeats the current subcommand string a specified number of times).

KR-208* Hotspot Menu

Hi everyone,
Haven't you wished you had a menu in your Mainframe session, to invoke/ run Mainframe commands, utilities, tools, macros and even Windows applications; with just a click of the mouse?

Hotspot Menu:

Well, we can do just that, with the help of EPC’s Hotspots feature.

• In the Extra! Client menu select View => Hotspots; in the ‘Assignments’ tab click on ‘Add’ and type in the text for which the Hotspot has to be activated. In the ‘Action’ tab select what action has to be performed when you click the Hotspot. Simple.

• Now wherever the ‘Hotspot Text’ you have added appears in your session, you can invoke the action defined for the text with the click of the mouse (you can choose Single click or Double click to invoke the hotspot action in the new version of EPC 8.0; in older versions the hotspot will be activated by Double click)

• So now that we have created a hotspot, why not we create a Menu with which we can invoke frequently used utilities, commands, macros, tools, Windows applications etc.?

• For eg. my menu might look something like this:

How do you assign actions to be invoked in the ‘Action’ tab?

• If Hotspot text ‘3.4’ should open a new DSLIST screen with a frequently used dataset name: In the ‘Action’ tab select ‘Miscellaneous’ Category, select ‘Send Keys’ (Commands), and assign Keystrokes as “<Home>START 3.4<Enter><Tab>TEST.FREQUENT.PDS”
  (where <Enter>, <Home> and <Tab> commands can be obtained from the 'Display Keys' list)

• If Hotspot text ‘ACET’ should execute a Macro, select ‘Macro’ under Category and select ‘Run Macro’ Command and assign the Macro which has to be run.

• If ‘CALC’ should open Calculator; select Application=> Run Application and assign the exe to be run. (For eg: to run Texpad you will assign ‘C:\Program Files\TextPad 4\TextPad.exe’)

• Hotspots can be used for doing much more. You can explore the different ‘Category’ and ‘Commands’ associated with it, in the ‘Action’ tab, and add more interesting functionalities to your Menu.

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