CA 7 JCL Library Alias (symbolic) usage

Products

• CA 7 Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

We have an application that would like to use Alias (symbolic) pointers to point to different release datasets for JCL.  Can you provide feedback on how best to handle the alias switch and any issues with current work already scheduled?  I expect that CA7 will pull in the JCL from the library once the submit time is reached.  Do you see any issue with changing an alias to different datasets while CA7 is executing and the ICOM are active? Also, When the JCL is brought into the internal scheduler’s queue(s) – XQJ for CA7.

Resolution

You can switch the data set that is pointed to by a symbolic while 7 is up. 

I tested this on our 7 by setting up two different members in two separate data sets and used the symbolic &MYJCL1 to refer one of the data sets, added a job using LIB: &MYJCL1  on the DB.1 screen, did LJCL and got the member it was currently pointing to. I then issued command 
/JCL,OPT=UPD,INDEX=&MYJCL1,DSN=new.data.set 
then did an LJCL and it now listed the different member. 

You would, of course need to be cognizant of when the JCL would be 'pulling' from the library so that it did not happen in the 'middle' of the /JCL command (timing).  A job’s JCL is pulled from the library that it is pointing to when the job enters the request queue (not necessarily job submission time).