If you want to select SMDEs by name, you supply a list of names that must be sorted in ascending order, without duplicates. Each name comprises a 2-byte length field followed by the characters of the name. When searching for names with fewer than 8 characters, the names are padded on the right with blanks to make up 8 characters. For each length field that contains a value greater than 8, DE services ignores trailing blanks and nulls beyond the eighth byte when doing the search.

In addition to retrieving the SMDE, member level connections can be established for each member name found. The members will be connected with the HOLD type connection. A connection type of HOLD insures that the member cannot be removed from the system until the connection is released. The connection intent is specified by the CONN_INTENT parameter, CONN_INTENT=HOLD must be specified.

All connections made through a single call to GET are associated with a single unique connect identifier. The connect identifier may be used to release all the connections in a single invocation of the RELEASE function. An example of DESERV GET is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. DESERV GET by NAME_LIST Control Block Structure