How to use overview control statements

The dialogs Define new System and System Properties contain the OVW push button used to attach a file containing overview control statements to the current system.

Attaching such a file to a system is optional. If this file is attached, the contained overview control statements are processed in the following ways:

You use action Create ---> Report Listing... from SMF Dump Data. Then the overview control statements are used to create a Report Listing containing a tabular Overview Report (suitable for reading, but not suitable for processing with a spreadsheet). This is the recommended way to create an Overview Report.
Figure 1. Processing a file containing overview control statements (1)
You use action Create ---> Working Set... from SMF Dump Data. Then you should select general option Create Overview Records in the Options dialog. The overview control statements are used to create an Overview Records resource which is needed as input to an Overview Working Set. If option Create Overview Records is not selected, the Spreadsheet Reporter creates a Report Listing containing a tabular Overview Report according to the overview control statements. The Spreadsheet Reporter issues a message to indicate, that the Working Set could not be created from this Report Listing.
Figure 2. Processing a file containing overview control statements (2)
You use action Create ---> Overview Record... from SMF Dump Data. This action is not possible without an attached file with overview control statements.

If no file containing overview control statements is attached to the system, and you want to create a Working Set in one step from SMF Dump Data, then the Spreadsheet Reporter will produce a Report Working Set containing the Postprocessor report types selected in the Options dialog.

If you want to create a Working Set from Report Listings or Overview Records, then the existence of an attached file is not checked, because the decision whether the Working Set should contain overview or report information has already been made.

Note: If you want to work with multiple sets of overview control statements for the same system, you can define multiple copies of the same system with a different System ID, a different file attachment, but with the same Hostname. This enables you to work with fixed attachments instead of changing the system properties all the time.

You can use the following spreadsheet macros to create a file containing overview control statements:

Use the macro Create Overview Control Statements to produce overview control statements for all spreadsheet macros requiring an Overview Working Set.
Use the DASD Activity Report macro to produce overview control statements for the Device Overview Report macro.
Use the Cache Subsystem Report macro to produce overview control statements for the Cache Subsystem Overview Report macro.
Use the Workload Activity Trend Report macro to produce overview control statements for the Workload Overview Report macro.

The advantage of the macros Cache Subsystem Report or DASD Activity Report is that they derive a list of identifiers from the loaded Working Set, for example, volume names when using the DASD Activity Report. You can select identifiers from this list, for example, the volumes with the highest activity.