Verison 1.3.0 of the EasySMF:JE Java API is now available.

Major Changes

EZSMFKEY DD

The program will now look for the key in the EZSMFKEY DD statement as well as the EASYSMFKEY environment variable. The EASYSMFKEY environment variable is no longer required for z/OS batch jobs.

API messages

API messages are now issued via the SLF4J logging framework instead of to STDOUT. This allows the destination to be customized, and avoids mixing them with program output written to STDOUT. The default destination for messages is STDERR.

SMF Section Constructors marked private

The SMF section class constructors were always documented as “intended for internal use only”. Now they are private. This allows more flexibilty in construction, which in turn allows more transparent handling of changes to sections.

Sample JCL changes

The sample JCL procedures have been modified to eliminate the extra step to concatenate user additions and changes to the environment variables. This is now done in the main program execution step.

QWHCTOKN

The DB2 Accounting Token QWHCTOKN in the Qwhc section now has its own class. It was initially unclear what type of data appeared in the QWHCTOKN. While it was frequently readable characters, it also often contained binary data. Since the purpose is presumably to match data by token, a string representation was no good because binary data might result in different tokens converting to the same String. So initially a BigInteger was chosen as a class that could uniquely represent 22 bytes of data, and be compared and used as a key etc.

However, since there is character data there, people might reasonably want to see it as a string. BigInteger doesn’t make for a simple EBCDIC to UTF8 conversion. So I created a specific class for the QWHCTOKN. Now they can be reliably compared and used as a key, and there is a custom toString() implementation that does the EBCDIC to UTF8 conversion on the character portion.

Reminder: the DB2 SMF record support is still in experimental status so there is a greater likelihood of changes to the API. In particular, while the status is experimental, improving the API is likely to take precedence over mainitaining compatibility with existing programs.