Overtyping a display

When you issue an INQUIRE request, you usually get a display that consists of status information for each resource in the specified group. The status information is displayed as a list of abbreviated keywords. You can move the cursor to some fields and change their contents by overtyping. When you press the ENTER key again, CICS® reads the contents of all fields that have been changed, and processes any valid operations implied by the changes. If you make an invalid change, you get an error message, and the field is not changed.

When a field is overtyped, CEMT will accept and identify only as few characters as are necessary to uniquely identify the keyword within the valid options for that position. This is usually only one character.

On many of the status displays, the current status is displayed in certain positional fields at the right-hand side of the display. For some fields, the positional display appears only when the status of a particular resource is ‘on'. You can overtype the current status (when it is either displayed or blank) to change it.

So, for example, if you type ‘CEMT INQUIRE SYD', you get a display of the current settings of the entries in the system dump table. The various attributes of those entries are displayed in fields across the screen. If CICS is to be shut down after the occurrence of an error for this dump code, ‘Shu' appears in the third field of attributes for that dump code. If CICS is not to be shut down, however, the ‘Shu' space is left blank. If you want CICS to be shut down for this dump code, you can tab to that field and type ‘shu' in that blank space in that field only.

The sequence of the positional fields is given in the descriptions of the various CEMT INQUIRE commands.

Whenever you overtype a display, not only is that particular action taken but all the status information is refreshed. You can avoid the overhead of a large number of table searches either by using the SET command, or by limiting your inquiry to a specific number of resources (either by using a ‘wild card' in the search argument or by naming a range of resource identifiers).