Description of structured fields

A structured field consists of:

A structured field introducer (SFI)
Data that follows the structured field introducer:

Part

Description

SFI

Structured field introducer. A structure with a minimum size of 8 bytes in this format:

Byte count: Description
2: Two-byte length. The length includes the length of the structured field introducer (8 bytes) and the length of the data following the structured field introducer.
3: Three-byte SFI identifier (ID)
1: One-byte SFI type modifier
1: One-byte (reserved)
1: One-byte data-type identifier

Data

Data following the structured field introducer, which can contain actual data, no data, binary zeros, or blank data.

See Structured field introducers (SFIs) for descriptions of the structured field introducers that the DFSMSrmm API returns.

Structured fields can appear in any order. Write your application so it skips over any structured field it is not prepared to handle. This makes your application program less sensitive to changes like enhancements to DFSMSrmm that introduce new or different structured fields and sequences. You can update your application program when it is convenient to do so rather than being forced to do so because your application program no longer works.

In the examples that follow, <SFI>data denotes a structured field introducer (SFI) that is followed by data. In the examples, the term "SFI" is replaced with its descriptive name, for example: <data-set-name>. There is no association between the length of a particular structured field introducer and its descriptive name.