AutoEdit Members

In a computer production environment, it is often necessary to manually modify JCL code prior to the submission of a job. The JCL Setup and AutoEdit Facilities of the Control-M Production Control System eliminate the need for these manual changes to the JCL. JCL Setup and the AutoEdit Facility are discussed in greater detail in the Control-M for z/OS User Guide.

The AutoEdit facility allows you to maintain a group of variables in a PDS library member. Both the variable name and its current value are maintained. This facility allows you to:

• retrieve the AutoEdit member into memory, making its variables available to the rule
• change any of the variable values, and write all changes back to the AutoEdit member on disk
• add new variables to the AutoEdit member

For a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of AutoEdit members, see the discussion on local variables and AutoEdit members in Chapter 3.

Within Control-M/Analyzer, AutoEdit members are available primarily for interaction with Control-M functions.

One technical consideration for using AutoEdit members is their relationship to the PDS library and its naming conventions. Each AutoEdit member resides in a PDS library, and therefore has a member name. This name should coincide with your data center naming conventions. You may also want to follow the group naming conventions, discussed in Preparing for Production — Application.