Modification of column heading and column width in reports

This RFE has been addressed to a considerable extent by the PTF for APAR PH08968 for CICS PA v5.4 that allowed users to specify the report column width.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=1087&context=SSPPU4&q=&uid=swg1PH08968&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en+en

Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
Brand - Servers and Systems Software
Product family - Enterprise Tooling
Product - CICS Performance Analyzer

For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
Brand - WebSphere
Product family - Enterprise Tooling
Product - CICS Performance Analyzer

Having discussed this with CICS PA development and CICS TS performance, this is not something we would want to change because the column headings refer to performance metrics that are understood by CICS performance specialists and the definitions of these column headings are described in detail in the CICS Performance Guide. With regard to the column widths, these have to remain standard for small values as well as very large values to ensure the report formats correctly. If the column widths were allowed to vary based on the values which may be very small or very large than the report format would be inconsistent. This is why CICS PA uses exponential format for high values. This way the column widths remain constant for very small and very large numbers. This is also explained in the CICS PA documentation as follows:

Some of the fields that contain large values might be represented in exponential format. For example, 2 834 000 might be shown as 2834E3.

Also, note that CICS PA also provides the option of creating a CSV extract for a report. This can be used in a spreadsheet tool and changes to column headings and column widths can be made. As spreadsheet tools have many capabilities for formatting and visualization of the data, this may be an option.