Invoking Access Method Services from Your Program

This appendix is intended to help you to invoke access method services from your program.

Access method services is invoked by your program through the ATTACH, LINK, or LOAD and CALL macro instructions.

The dynamic invocation of access method services enables respecification of selected processor defaults as well as the ability to manage input/output operations for selected data sets.

A processing program invokes access method services with the ATTACH, LINK, LOAD, and CALL macros. Before issuing the invoking macro, however, the program must initialize the appropriate register and operand list contents.

Access method services does not support the S99TIOEX, S99ACUCB, and S99DSABA options of dynamic allocation. These three options are called the XTIOT, UCB nocapture and DSAB-above-the-line options. This restriction applies to the required SYSIN and SYSPRINT data sets and to the DD names that are identified by keywords on the commands.

This restriction does not apply to data sets that are handled by the user routines that are described in User I/O Routines.

IDCAMS must be entered in 31-bit mode. If you are using supervisor-assisted services (for example, LINK, XCTL, or ATTACH), they will ensure IDCAMS is entered correctly. If you are using LOAD to obtain the address of IDCAMS, you must ensure that you enter IDCAMS in 31-bit mode.

Regardless of the method of invocation, all addresses passed to IDCAMS that represent 24-bit storage must have their high-order byte of the address set to zero. This includes the address of the caller's register save area contained in register 13 and any parameter list pointer passed in register 1.

The contents of the operand list are described in Figure 1. Refer to "Authorized Program Facility" in z/OS DFSMS Managing Catalogs for information on manipulating sensitive data in a secured environment.