TABLE TOOL

[Felicity Vaughan]

Who is using the Table Tool and the Options element Type?  How successful has it been for you and how difficult has it been to maintain?

Thanks.

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Felicity
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[Eoin OCleirigh]

Simply put, once you've used you'll probably discover you can't live without it. At first I wanted to put everything that used to be processor overrides into Site Symbols, but you soon come across issues where developer's (end users) need control. Using CONPARMX, with OPTIONS members is the first step, adding table tool gives you a whole heap more flexibility, mostly in how the developers can tailor their options. Dan I'm sure would happily present a couple of the most typical uses of table tool.

[Felicity Vaughan]

Thanks for the input Eoin.

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Felicity
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[Eoin OCleirigh]

I'd like to point out that the Table tool (or more properly the ENBPIU00 Rexx routine is an incredible pocket-knife of a utility - it can almost dance!
Hint: Read the flower box documentation at the top of the member!

But the most obvious use cases in a processor are;

1) Using keyword choices, to set return codes that control later steps in a processor (e.g. DEBUG=YES, COBOL=6,...)

2) Reformatting keyword style user choices (like DB2=YES, OWNER=JDWUSER,SQL=MAYBE...)  into appropriately formatted syntax using models.

Remember, that most of the time the INPUT to TableTool will be a passed in by a CONPARMX search, which allows you to set all the "site" defaults, but have overrides at the appropriate level, maybe system or Element, and that the search dataset can also be lifecycle built so you get different defaults at each stage.  The simple mixture of return codes with Endevor's IF/THEN/ELSE can give you total flexibility over processor flow, concatenations etc.  And yes Dan, if you're following, maybe an alternate 'Default' starter set of generic processors wrapped with Table Tool/Conparmx logic control...  It's much easier to adapt a sample than convert an existing processor.