About the FORMAT OPTIONS command

Use the FORMAT OPTIONS command statement to set the processing options for your formatting.

The default format options for the FORMAT OPTIONS command statement are as follows:

FORMAT OPTIONS NOCOMP STRING DICT NOTSO TOTALS TITLES

TOTALS|NOTOTALS|TOTALSONLY

Use this option to specify whether you want the totals fields formatted. In situations where the detail data might be voluminous and unnecessary for the purposes of the report, specify TOTALSONLY. The default setting is TOTALS.

TSO|NOTSO

If you are formatting interactively, you can submit a job with commands. However, when the format is created from a batch plan, the JCL to execute batch TSO must be specified. Specify TSO to create the batch TSO in addition to the formatting of the commands. The default setting is NOTSO.

DICTIONARY|NODICTIONARY

There might be circumstances, such as when users make long specifications as a single line that does not contain continuation characters, that you might need to provide a dictionary for formatted fields. The dictionary provides the name of the data element, the offset within the line, and the field length. The dictionary is used when you need to retrieve the formatted data in an interactive dialog manager session. The default setting is DICTIONARY .

COMP|NOCOMP

Use this option to compress the trailing blank spaces in formatting commands. For example, when you have the symbolic /SDSN in a formatting command, it has a field length of 44; if the values substituted for the symbolic are typically much shorter than 44 characters, you might want to compress the trailing blanks. If you want data captured in a fixed column format, specify NOCOMP. The default setting is NOCOMP.

TITLES|NOTITLES

Use this option to specify whether you want the formatted output to have a title. While the title might be helpful if the output is a report, it might cause problems if the formatted output is JCL. The value you specify for this option is free-form, and cannot exceed one line or 65 characters (including blank spaces) in length. The default setting is NOTITLES.

STRING|NOSTRING

The symbolics and the constants coded in the formatting request lines are limited in length. If you want the data represented as a single line of data, use the plus sign (+) or minus sign (-) as the line continuation character. The position represented by these characters is replaced by the value of the first column of the following line. If you do not specify a continuation character, the last significant character or computed end of a variable is the connecting point.

Consider an example:

/SDSN CONTAINS /STRKS +
TRACKS OF DATA REPRESENTING /KB2 2 KB RECORDS

Using the STRING option causes the data to be formatted into a single line:

DCD.AMS.UCAT CONTAINS 000001 TRACKS OF DATA REPRESENTING 0000000005 2 KB RECORDS
DCD.ASM CONTAINS 000036 TRACKS OF DATA REPRESENTING 0000000196 2 KB RECORDS     
DCD.ASM2 CONTAINS 000022 TRACKS OF DATA REPRESENTING 0000000163 2 KB RECORDS

The following figure shows an example of a filter plan with formatting. The plan contains the standard formatting options. When this plan is executed, all data qualified by the filter criteria are formatted into a single string of characters.

MCDS STANDARD FORMAT                                                    
FORMAT TITLE MCDS STANDARD FORMAT                                       
FORMAT FOLLOWS                                                          
/SDSN /SMG /SRCNT /SCRDT /SRFDT +                                       
/SMGDT /SBKDT /SXPDT /SVOL /SL0 /SL +                                   
/SV /SKB2 /STRK /SDCLSS /SMCLSS +                                       
/SSCLSS /SDP /SI                                                        
SORT FOLLOWS                                                            
STRK,C,D                                                                
FILTER FOLLOWS                                                          
SMG      EQ D                                            AND          

The default setting is NOSTRING.