Library concatenation

Whenever the first Group field is accompanied by three additional fields horizontally across the screen, you can enter a library concatenation sequence, which is a series of group names chained together. ISPF searches these groups in the sequence that you enter them.

You can concatenate libraries of the same type, but only libraries that belong to the same project. You will usually concatenate the lowest-level library ahead of the next higher-level library, and so on, in bottom-to-top order. Therefore, concatenation is usually most effective if this search sequence is the same as the library hierarchy.

For example, new library members or members undergoing changes generally reside in libraries used by program developers. A test library may contain members that have been unit tested and are ready for integration test. A master library might contain fully tested members that correspond to a previously released version of the program.

Concatenated libraries must have consistent record formats and logical record lengths. You can use concatenation with these ISPF functions:

Viewing
Browsing
Editing
Selecting Library Utility (option 3.1) functions:
- Print index or complete data set
- Browse, delete, edit, print, rename, or view members
- Compress data set.
Copying data sets or members
Compiling
Assembling
link-editing
SCRIPT/VS processing.

Note: You can also use additional input libraries for compilations and assemblies.

Figure 1 shows a sample three-level hierarchy consisting of a set of master libraries, a set of test libraries, and three sets of private development libraries identified by user ID. Using this hierarchy, a typical concatenation sequence for a project of ISPFPROJ, a type of DATA, and a member PGM1 is:

ISPF Library:
   Project . . . ISPFPROJ
   Group . . . . JOE      . . . TEST____ . . . MASTER__
   Type  . . . . DATA
   Member  . . . PGM1____

Figure 1. Hierarchy of ISPF Libraries

In this hierarchy, the top level is MASTER, with components ASM, COBOL, TEXT, DATA and SCRIPT. All levels have the same components. The second level is TEST, and the third level is JOE, FRANK and TOM.

In this example, the search for member PGM1 goes through libraries:

ISPFPROJ.JOE.DATA
ISPFPROJ.TEST.DATA
ISPFPROJ.MASTER.DATA