IBM Z JCL Expert Plug-in for Zowe CLI

IBM Z JCL Expert Plug-in for Zowe CLI allows you to remotely invoke IBM Z JCL Expert from your workstation.

How the plug-in works

The plug-in is a wrapper for SSH calls to a remote mainframe system. It invokes the jclx command, which is the interface to run IBM Z JCL Expert under z/OS UNIX System Services (USS) on the remote system. The response is output as JSON or plain text and returned to the Zowe CLI extension. The plug-in does not require the Zowe APIML to be installed on the remote mainframe system.

Prerequisites

Local

• Zowe CLI
  • A Zowe CLI z/OSMF profile.
  • A Zowe CLI SSH profile.

Remote Mainframe System

• Your TSO user ID must have access to USS and z/OSMF, and have SSH connectivity.
• IBM Z JCL Expert must be installed and configured.

Installation

• Run the following command: zowe plugins install @ibm/jcl-expert-for-zowe-cli

Configuration

The jclx profile for this plug-in is required with at least the remoteHomeDir specified to communicate with the mainframe. If the remoteHomeDir profile property is not configured, submission of commands will fail.

The properties of the 'jclx' profile are as follows:

• remoteHomeDir specifies the remote home installation directory of your IBM Z JCL Expert USS interface. This is the directory that contains the bin directory.

• remoteTempDir specifies where all temporary files used to facilitate the request and response are kept for duration of each command execution. This should be a directory that the specified SSH user ID has permissions to both read and write. The default directory is /tmp.

• language specifies the language to be requested by the plug-in. Valid property values are 'ENU' and 'JPN'. The command will default to your system configuration setting if this property is not set (the system will default to 'ENU' if language is not configured).

• responseEncoding specifies the character set of the response from IBM Z JCL Expert. This will default to utf-8 if not specified, and no encoding conversion will be performed if binary, none or an empty string is provided.

Each of these properties can also be specified as a command line option for a command invocation with --remote-home-dir, --remote-temp-dir, --language, and --response-encoding respectively.

Commands

The commands for this plug-in have the same input and option interface as the jclx IBM Z JCL Expert USS interface, with a few differences.

See the --help option for each command for their respective inputs and options.

• zowe jclx local <local-filepath> [options] will upload a local file on your machine to the remote system as a temporary file and then validate it.

• zowe jclx remote-ds <remote-dsn> [options] will request that a data set on the remote system is validated and the output is returned to your local machine.

• zowe jclx remote-fs <remote-filepath> [options] will request that a zFS (USS) file on the remote system is validated and the output is returned to your local machine.

Unless specified otherwise with the --output text option, these commands will default to returning JSON output.

Options

The IBM Z JCL Expert Zowe CLI plugin allows the following options for each command which follow the same formatting conventions as the USS jclx interface.

• --output | -o specifies the output format provided upon completion. Defaults to 'json' if not provided.

• --alias | -a specifies an optional alias to give the target file during analysis.

• --dsn-check | -c turns on or off DSN and USS file existence checking during analysis. Defaults to 'ON'.

• --job-class | -j specifies the default job class to use during JCL analysis if none is provided in the job card.

• --log-level | -l specifies the level of internal diagnostic logging that is performed during analysis. Defaults to 'FATAL'.

• --log-file | -d specifies the local relative file path that logged messages are output to. Any existing file on the specified path will be overwritten.

• --target-user specifies a surrogate user ID to validate the JCL under on the mainframe. Defaults to the requesting user ID if not provided.

• --system specifies the name of a system with a valid hostname mapping (found in the jclx_config.ini file in the installation directory on the mainframe system) that will run the requested validation.

• --vartable specifies a variable table name that is required for IZWS variable substitution.

• --datesim specifies an optional date-time value that can be used to simulate time specific IZWS variable substitution values. Format is CCYYMMDDHHMM.

The --help option for each command will provide detailed descriptions of each available option.

More Information

See https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/z-jcl-expert for more product information and documentation.