BMC Mainframe: REXX Programming under TSO/ISPF
The course is developed and delivered by © RSM Technology.
REXX is a powerful multi-purpose and user-friendly programming tool, used to exploit many IBM and third-party operational products. It is the tool of choice in most (if not all) of today's larger data centers for those who need to implement new operational procedures both quickly and effectively.
This three-day course is designed for TSO/ISPF users who wish to learn how to create and use programs in the REXX language. The course is taught combining formal classroom teaching with many practical exercises and problem scenarios, thus ensuring a full understanding of this powerful procedural language.
Major release:
BMC Mainframe Infrastructure Platform Training
Good for:
Operators
Course Delivery:
Instructor-Led Training (ILT) | 24 hours
Course Modules
-
Introduction to REXX
- Executing REXX EXECs
- elements of the REXX language: Clauses, Tokens, Labels, Assignments, Instructions and Commands
- constant and variable symbols
- Simple, Compound & Stem variable symbols
- operators for concatenation, arithmetic, comparison & logical operations. This segment introduces the terminology associated with REXX and shows how data fields are defined and initialized
-
Tracing and Debugging
- Using TRACE instruction for debugging
- using immediate commands HI, HT, TS and TE
- use of EXECUTIL
- interpreting TRACE output. This segmentcdescribes the tracing facilities available in REXX to enable more rapid problem determination
-
Parsing Strings
- Parsing variables and strings
- basic parsing techniques
- special templates
- place holders, literal patterns, and numeric patterns.
- Explains how input from any source can be split into useable entities using various techniques
-
Control Instructions
- Decisions: IF, THEN, ELSE, SELECT, WHEN, OTHERWISE
- creating and controlling loops: DO WHILE, UNTIL, FOREVER, LEAVE, ITERATE
- introduction to sub-routines.
- This segment describes the IF, THEN, ELSE logic used in REXX
-
Sub-routines and Functions
- Internal and external sub-routines
- how to create internal and external functions
- passing arguments and results to and from sub-routines and functions
- CALL
- RETURN
- EXIT
- PROCEDURE
- RESULT.
- This segment shows how to create subroutines and functions, and identifies the difference between them
-
REXX Built-in Functions
- Introduction to REXX supplied built in functions
- how to use the most useful ones: ARG, DATE, TIME, DATATYPE, LENGTH, POS, WORDS, LEFT, RIGHT, STRIP, SPACE, COPIES and WORD.
- This segment explains the commonly used REXX built-in functions, and indicates their use in REXX programs
-
Data Stack Management
- LIFO and FIFO stacking
- avoiding the stack
- writing to the stack: PUSH and QUEUE
- reading from the stack: PARSE PULL
- creating and managing extensions to the stack: MAKEBUF, QBUF and DROPBUF
- interrogating the stack: QUEUE, QELEM
- creating and managing private stacks: NEWSTACK, DELSTACK and QSTACK.
- This segment describes the stack mechanisms used by TSO and REXX
-
Using TSO Commands & Functions
- Using TSO commands and functions: SYSDSN, LISTDSI, MSG, OUTTRAP, PROMPT and SYSVAR
- reading and writing datasets with EXECIO.
- Shows how to invoke and use TSO commands from a REXX program