Identifying records that could not be marked

When you are marking or unmarking records, it might be useful to know if all the records you identified were successfully processed.

For example, you might mistakenly ask CICSPlex® SM to mark or unmark a record that was previously deleted from the result set. Or you might identify a record number that is out of range for the result set.

You can use the COUNT option on a MARK or UNMARK command to determine the number of records that could not be marked or unmarked. You can also use the INTO and LENGTH options to identify a buffer to receive a list of records that could not be marked. When deciding on the length of the INTO buffer, keep in mind that it must be long enough to hold the maximum number of record numbers that could result from your MARK request (if none of them can be marked). Furthermore, all record numbers are listed individually (not by range) in the INTO buffer and are separated by commas. So if you specified the PARM option like this:

  PARM('1,3:6,12,15.')

the INTO buffer would have to be long enough to hold the following character string:

  1,3,4,5,6,12,15

If the INTO buffer you specify is not long enough to hold a complete list of records that could not be marked, you receive a RESPONSE value of WARNING AREATOOSMALL. In that case, the INTO buffer returns a partial list of records and the LENGTH value is set to the buffer length that would be required for a complete list. You could then resubmit the MARK command with the appropriate LENGTH value to determine which records could not be marked.