JCL Standards #5 Company Name Graphic: Insert your organization's name in the above slide. Audio should include the following: Welcome to the JCL Standards #5 presentation. My name is _____. I work in the ___ department and have been using JCL for ___ years. (This should be expanded so the learner is confident that you have the right credentials to create this presentation.) This presentation follows on from a number of Datatrain e-learning modules and focuses on our organization’s method of coding conditional checking in JCL. You will also look at the problems that are commonly experienced and the best-practice methods that are used to solve them.

Conditional checking Why do you need to know about conditional coding? How do we handle conditional checking? Presenter: Replace the COND parameter/IF THEN ELSE ENDIF statement example on the above slide with a more relevant statement. Audio should cover the following: Datatrain modules focus on the general use of the COND parameter and the IF/THEN/ELSE/ENDIF statements, and describe how they can be used to control the way in which specific steps in JCL are run or bypassed. You will now look at the conditional checking that is supported in our organization’s JCL.

In what ways is conditional coding useful? Ensuring completed jobs have performed the task they are designed for Writing efficient code to cater for different situations Presenter: Replace the COND parameter/IF THEN ELSE ENDIF statement example on the above slide with a more relevant statement. Audio should include the following: The use of conditional step execution will be valuable to you in the following situations: (a) You are required to write JCL that undertakes steps, such as reports or the automatic restoring of data sets, which are based on the success or failure of other steps. (Provide real-life examples of this situation.) (b) You need to read the results of your own job or another person's job (operator) to determine whether all the steps have completed successfully. (c) You have to perform a job restart and a conditional statement is embedded in the JCL that you must rerun.

How do we handle conditional checking? COND parameter on the EXEC or JOB statement IF/THEN/ELSE/ENDIF statement Or a combination? Audio should cover the following, if relevant: Datatrain modules describe how both the COND parameter on the JOB and EXEC statements and the IF/THEN/ELSE/ENDIF statements perform conditional checking. In our organization, we use _____. (Explain why this type of coding is used in preference to the other.)

Conditional checking - action Common conditional codes produced by our jobs What action should you take if conditional coding terminates a job? Audio should cover the following, if relevant: You will now look at some of the common and uncommon condition codes that are produced by jobs that we run. (Provide information about several different condition codes from existing jobs.) If a job that you are looking at contains steps that have flushed, you must determine whether action is required and, if so, what action to take. Explain whether an external third-party product such as Control-M or CA-7 has been configured for production jobs and will know whether a job is considered to be successful, even though some steps may have flushed. Where a job is not using this product, the action taken depends on the processes you have in place. This might involve the use of comments in the JCL indicating the action to be taken, or standard practices that prescribe the action or escalation to be taken. If standard practices are in place, explain where a copy of them can be located.

JCL problem handling Common error-related system and user codes you can expect to see How do I restart a job that has previously failed? Audio should include the following: You will now take the next step after coding the JCL, which is actually running it and fixing any problems that occur. You will see some examples of non-syntax errors that can occur in our environment, how these are solved, and how the job is restarted.

Common error-related system and user codes What system and user error codes are you likely to encounter? What action should be taken when the above occurs? Graphics: Select an example of output showing a system abend code that has occurred in your organization and include it on this slide. If you want to display a range of error codes, display graphics on several subsequent slides. Audio should cover the following, if relevant: Datatrain courses explain several different system abend and user codes that you may have already encountered in our organization. Explain what these codes mean, such as 0C7, 222, 806, B37, and E37, and the action that must be taken when they occur. For example, if a B37 is displayed, what action should be taken to increase the space requirement? Also, explain where this action is documented.

Job restart How are job restarts handled in our organization? Do we use job check-pointing? Audio should cover the following, if relevant: Describe the products that are used for job restarts, such as Control-M Restart or CA Workload Automation Restart. Also explain who has access to these products; access may be restricted to production only or include other groups. If job restart products are used in your organization, explain how they are accessed and the standards that apply to them. Some organizations discourage job restarts that are not performed at the start of the job. If this is the case with your organization, explain how JCL is written to support this, and provide any other information that is required to rerun a job in this way, such as the deletion of previously created data sets. Datatrain courses mention the use of job check-pointing. Explain whether this is used and why.

Summary Conditional checking standards Identifying batch errors Rerunning batch jobs Audio: This presentation focused on the way conditional checking occurs in batch jobs in our organization. You also discovered how to identify whether your batch job completed successfully and, if not, how to rerun it. The next stage of your training schedule is the “Your chance to code!” Webinar, which wraps up your JCL training and provides you with some exercises. Being a Webinar, you will have the opportunity to interact with the presenter so any JCL-related questions that you have should be forwarded to ____ before this session so that they can be integrated into the presentation. Thank you for attending.