Control-M Variable facility

The Variable facility consists of a group of special variables and functions that can be used to make your job processing definitions more dynamic. This facility also enables you to define your own variables.

Certain Variable functions and variables work differently for z/OS jobs. Although some of these differences are described in this chapter, BMC recommends that you consult the Control‑M for z/OS User Guide for a more complete description of Variable functionality for z/OS jobs.

Using variables and functions, you can

Access information about the system under which a job is running
Pass information to a job or modify working parameters of the job
Pass information in a Notification message or a Do Mail message to a user when the job ends

You cannot include application-specific job parameters in the values of variables. The names of application-specific job parameters are prefixed by two percent signs, the application’s abbreviation and a hyphen (%%SAPR3- for SAP, %%OAP- for Oracle, and so on).

Variables in a job processing definition are resolved immediately before the job is submitted, in the order in which they appear in the job processing definition. If a variable is included in the notification, Notify, Action, and Handle Output of the job, the variables are re-evaluated and resolved when these actions are performed.

If a job is rerun, the variable statements specified in the Variable Assignment parameter are resolved before those specified using the Set Variable parameter.

For more information about variable types, see Variables. For more information about variable functions, see Variable Expressions.

Parameter	Description
Variable Assignment	Modifies working parameters for a job and/or passes parameters to a job when the job is submitted. Defines variables that can be displayed in a Notification message or Do Mail message when a job completes. This parameter is called in certain Control‑M/Server utilities and in Control-M.
Command	Variables can be used as part of the command string.
Do Variable	Enables the user to specify variable statements to be resolved (in addition to those specified for Variable Assignment) depending on how a job ended. These can be local variables to be used if the job is rerun, or they can be global variables to be used by other jobs.
Member library	Variables can be used in this parameter to indicate the name of the library or directory in which the file described in the parameter is located.
Member	Variables can be used in this parameter to indicate the name of the file containing the job commands or job script.
Override Path	Variables can be used in this parameter to provide the name of the override path in which to search for the file that was specified using the File name/Member name parameter.
Notification or Notify	Variables can be used in a Notification or Notify message to pass job parameters or other data to a user.
Output Handling or Do Output	Variables can be used in the field which provides supplementary information about the handling of the job’s output (for example, a filename) when the job ends OK.

The Variable Assignment and Set Variable parameters can also use the %%LIBMEMSYM variable to reference a list of variable expressions in a separate text file. For more information, see Variable lists.