Symbolic Substitution

Symbolic substitution substitutes information in a Process. When IBM® Connect:Direct® encounters an ampersand (&) followed by 1-8 alphanumeric characters, it substitutes a string represented by the ampersand and alphanumeric characters. For example:

&USERID=BOB
DSN=CD || &USERID

Resolves to:

DSN=CDBOB

Separate multiple symbolics with spaces, as shown in the following:

SUBMIT PROC=TSTSEND &DSN1=TSTSEND.VAR0001.S200010 &RUNDATE=200012 &TSTDATE=200010

Symbolic resolution occurs before concatenation.

The following example encloses a string in double quotation marks to resolve the symbolic &FILTYP.

PROC2	PROCESS	SNODE=CD.VM &FILTYP=FT	
	COPY  FROM	(DSN=OS390.DATA	-
		DISP=SHR)	-
	      TO  	(DSN="FN || &FILTYP"	-
		LINK=(IVVB,WIVVB,W,191)	-
		DISP=(RPL))

Double quotation marks are not valid for symbolic substitution in Microsoft Windows. Use the SYMBOL statement and concatenation instead.

If you are using symbolic substitution for SNODEID and want to pass both a user ID and password, you must have separate symbolic names for each entity, that is, a symbolic name for the user ID and another for the password.

For example, if you code the following:

&MYSTUFF=myid,mypass
SNODED=(&MYSTUFF)

IBM Connect:Direct will interpret &MYSTUFF as one block rather than as two entities–a user ID and password.

To pass two pieces of information in this example, code it like the following:

&MYNAME=myid
&MYPASS=mypass
SNODEID=(&MYNAME,&MYPASS)