There are far too many ISPF commands available to list. What follows is a brief description of some of the most useful, or the most recently added features that I didn’t have space to include before.
PANELID and MSGID are two features available for many years in ISPF, and are especially useful for anyone doing ISPF Dialog development or testing. Issue PANELID as a Primary Command (i.e., from the Command ===> line) to see the PDS member name of the current ISPF Dialog Panel. Use MSGID in the same way to view the Message Number of the current or most recent ISPF Dialog Message. Armed with the name or number of the Panel or Message, you can then use DDLIST to locate the exact dataset the ISPF dialog component was called from.
A more recently added feature is Reference Lists. In times past, many systems programmers have written a dataset-list utility, and quite a few vendor products have provided similar functions. Usually, the task of writing one from scratch is performed as part of your education in the creation of ISPF Dialogs. Today, IBM provides this feature built into ISPF for you. I’m interested to know what functionality junior systems programmers add to ISPF for their training exercises (reader comments are welcome, as usual).
Some useful primary commands for the Reference List feature include:
- REFACTD & REFLISTD: Opens the current personal dataset list; displays the last 30 datasets you have edited
- REFACTL & REFOPENL: Opens the current personal library list; displays the last eight libraries you have edited
- REFOPEND: Displays the list of personal dataset lists
- REFOPENL: Displays the list of personal library lists
- REFADDD: Adds the last-referenced dataset to a Reference List and requires the Reference List Name as a parameter (e.g., REFADDD TEST adds the last dataset referenced to the Reference List named TEST; TEST is created if it doesn’t already exist)
- REFADDL: Same as REFADDD, but for Libraries
If you like to use the Point and Shoot fields available from the top line of all ISPF screens, a great alternative to disabling the “Tab to action bar choices” check-box under ISPF Option 0 is to leave the “Tab to action bar choices” on, and set your PF12 key to the command CRETRIEV. CRETRIEV works exactly like RETRIEVE with the added feature that, the first time you use it, no command is retrieved. Rather, the cursor is simply returned to the command line.
If you use custom logon execs invoked by your TSO Logon Procedure, the ISPLIBD command may be useful. ISPLIBD invoked at the command line displays ISPF libraries allocated using the ISPF LIBDEF service.
