HourGlass Support

Setup of HourGlass Support

The COPE Time and Date Management Feature supports HourGlass made by IBM and TicToc made by Isogon. Either product must be acquired separately by users of the COPE Time and Date Management Feature.

The COPE Time and Date Management Feature allows every Logical System to have a different setting of the system date and time. Both Batch and on-line support of IMS is provided. The desired dates and times are defined inside the ISPF portion of COPE and the resulting specifications are generated into the COPEXRF4 load module for use by the execution environment.

Some Logical Systems may use the system date and are excluded from the time and date manipulation whilst other logical systems have altered dates.

The COPE HourGlass support may be activated by specifying XHRGLASS=YES or XHRGLASS+S in the ZDEFAULT PROCS copy.

The XHRGLASS=S option allows a user to specify an individual time stamp for his user ID. With this option COPE does not enforce a timestamp for a MPP or IFP executing application. COPE will enforce the COPE specified timestamp for Batch and BMP applications unless there is a HourGlass JCL override DD statement.

When the XHRGLASS parameter is specified, an additional selection option will appear on the administrator’s panel. Option 1.13 appears as shown in the following figure.

Setup Menu with Hourglass Option

When Option 13 is selected the following panel is displayed (see the following figure).

Virtual Date Specification screen

All defined Logical Systems are displayed. The user may specify 'Absolute' or 'Relative' dates for each system. If the date is not to be manipulated, all fields should be left blank next to the Logical System.

If an 'Absolute' date is specified, the date and time for every on-line and BMP and Batch job will always remain the same. The date may be either specified in the form MM/DD/YYYY or as a number prefixed by a + or - sign. If a number is specified for an absolute date, it will be converted to a date of the form MM/DD/YYYY when the enter key is pressed.

A 'Relative' Time/Date specification will cause a fixed amount to be added to the current date/time. This will allow a realistic set of dates to be obtained during testing over several days. The time specification may be left blank which will result in the use of the current system time for the Logical System.

MPP JCL Requirements for XHRGLASS=YES

No additional DD card should be added to all COPE controlled message. HourGlass provides its own copy of DFSRRC00 and requires a //HGIMSMSG DD DUMMY statement to be added to the MPRs. THE HGIMS DD STATEMENT SHOULD NOT BE SPECIFIED IN THE MESSAGE REGION JCL AND THE HOURGLASS DFSRRC00 MODULE SHOULD NOT BE USED. If the Hourglass STEPLIB is defined or the HGIMSMSG DD added the COPE Y2K Feature WILL NOT WORK in the MPP environments.

No additional DD statements are required for batch or BMP jobs since they will be added automatically by COPE. The Logical System must be identified in the JOB card, the COPEBSYS DD statement, or in the IMSID field as it is for all COPE jobs.

MPP JCL Requirements for XHRGLASS=S

A non HourGlass modified DFSRRC00 should be accessed via the COPESTEP DD concatenation. The HourGlass STEPLIB dataset is required and a HGIMS DD DUMMY JCL statement should be added to each message region.

HourGlass Abends

COPE will check on the presence of HourGlass for logical systems that require the date to be altered, and will abend with a 779 Abend code if HourGlass is not started and running. This will prevent accidental updating of the data with incorrect dates due to operational difficulties.