ISPF edit macro, how to prevent "Browse substituted" from occurring..?

Question

Steve Ives provided ALLMEM code to run an edit macro against all members of a PDS, see here: How can I run ISPF Edit Macros in Batch

Some members in my PDS are too large (by default) for edit/view and suffer "Browse substituted" on the line:

Address 'ISPEXEC' 'EDIT DATAID('data1')',
        'MEMBER('member1') MACRO('workmac')'

Since browse cannot run edit-macros the MACRO('workmac') bit does not come into play, there is no END command issued to return execution to the loop in ALLMEM, and the overall batch execution stops until I manually hit my PF3.

Is there any way I can force TSO to keep in EDIT mode for these large members?

Answer 1

Is there any way I can force TSO to keep in EDIT mode for these large members?

Maybe.

ISPF Edit has an LRECL limit. If your members that are too large exceed this there isn't anything much you can do about that. If you want to engage in radical notions like splitting each record in two so they are editable, editing them, then reassembling each record pair back into a single record, that's a separate issue.

But maybe the problem isn't your LRECL, but the number of records. You might be able to do something about that.

You could try increasing the REGION parameter for your batch job in which you are running your ISPF Edit macro. I don't know if your personal ISPF settings matter in an ISPF batch job, but you could type EDITSET in an ISPF Edit session and ensure that the value for "Maximum initial storage allowed for Edit and View" is 0, just in case it matters.

Be advised that this may fix your problem, but it's possible your members are simply too big for ISPF Edit. In that case, you must find an alternate mechanism. Since you already have an edit macro, perhaps you could alter it, substituting your own code for ISPF Edit services, and run that code against your data. Perhaps this is an opportunity to learn the marvelous features of your SORT utility. Or awk. Lots of options.

Answer 2

If it is only certain members then it is not an LRECL issue, but strictly size. As cschneid mentioned you can try and maximize the storage available to Edit. However, if the member is really large then you wold eventually hit a storage limit. Currently Edit or View will switch to Browse in that case. If you are running Batch then this presents a problem as you describe. There is nothing that will keep it in Edit. RC=4 is already a documented return code for Browse being substituted, but if you are in batch then you probably end up in a display loop. One possible solution would be to have your own copy of ISRBROBA in ISPPLIB and have it set .RESP = END in the )INIT or )PROC section so as to force an END if BROWSE gets used. Since it is a batch job it is unlikely you would need the normal version of ISRBROBA. You would just make sure that your PANEL library is concatenated first.