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Status Future consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 6, 2023

Support $ as first Charakter for variables when using WAPL

According to this: 

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/z-workload-scheduler-101-extends-orchestration-capabilities-managed-file-transfer-enhances-operational-experience-ai-streamlines-workflows-definition-renewed-workload-designer?region=US

TWS 10.1 is the last release with OCL supported. So everything has to be migrated to WAPL.

According to "Workload Automation Programming" Guide, $ as first charakter of variable names is not supported:

"Variables are tokens within the command statements that are to be replaced with
actual values immediately before the statement is run.
A variable name begins with a prefix character, which is usually an exclamation
mark (!) to avoid conflicts with IBM Z Workload Scheduler variable substitution
(but this can be changed), and an optional termination character of a period (.).
The variable name must start with an alphabetic character, then it can consist of
characters A-Z, 0-9, @, #, _ and the special characters £ and $. The special
characters can be modified by using the OPTIONS VARNAMES statement. The name
can be any length. However, if the variables you create in Workload Automation
Programming Language are also to be stored in the IBM Z Workload Scheduler
JCL Variable Tables, their names must also conform to the JCL Variable naming
convention."

We have hundreds of variables that start with $ as first character, as this was possible with OCL. WAPL has to be changed so that $ is also supported as first charakter, otherwise WAPL can't be used as replacement of OCL.

Idea priority Urgent
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 13, 2023

    Hello Marco,


    thanks for that note. Is there anywhere an official statement, that OCL will be kept for now? The only hint in the documentations still says, that it will be dropped..


    Thanks.

  • Admin
    Marco Cardelli
    Reply
    |
    Nov 10, 2023

    We will consider this requirement, but please consider that we have decided to keep OCL in our next IZWS release.