Customizing viewable columns in SDSF panels

Did you know you can edit which fields are displayed in SDSF, their width, and the order they’re displayed in by default?

To make these changes, you first need two pieces of information: the display group you’re part of and the member name that SDSF is reading its parameters from.

To Find your group

In any SDSF panel, enter ‘WHO' in the command input.

This displays information about your session, such as your user ID, your login PROC, your GRPINDEX, and your GRPNAME (these last two are important, so make a note of them).

To find the sdsf parameter member in use

Issue the MVS command ‘/F SDSF,DISPLAY‘ from SDSF, or the same command without the leading slash if you have an MVS console.

There should be a line beginning with PARMS: that shows the member name and data set location.

The default member is SYS1.PARMLIB(ISFPRM00).

We’ve found the important information, now for the customizing

Go to the location of your ISFPRMxx member and open it for editing (preferably after you’ve saved a backup of it in case you mess up).

If you’re working at a client site, there are probably already groups defined in this member. That’s why we first checked which group we were part of. Find your group in the ISFPRMxx member. It will start with a line similar to ‘GROUP ILPROC(BATCH)‘ (where BATCH is your group name in this example).

Everything indented beneath this line defines your group’s attributes. If you have any customized fields, they’ll be listed here using ‘nnFIELDS' statements, where nn is the short character name for the SDSF panel being customized.

For example, CKFIELDS customizes the Health Checker panel fields, while HFIELDS customizes the Held Output panel fields. It will appear like this ‘HFIELDS(HFIELD1)' (where HFIELD1 is our example customized display).

The name of the customized display listed here points to a section of FLDENT statements beneath a ‘FLD NAME(n) TYPE(m)' statement (where n is the name you found in the group definition and m is the type of panel being customized).

Below that will be a FLDENT line for every column you want displayed in the SDSF panel table. FLDENT statements follow this syntax ‘FLDENT COLUMN(c),TITLE(t),WIDTH(n)‘

Note: If you want to use a title containing non-standard characters, such as hyphens or spaces, enclose the title (t) in single quotation marks like this ‘…,TITLE('Sample Title')‘

IBM has a handy reference table that lists all available columns and their default attributes.

Reading in the new ISFPRMxx after customizations

Once you’ve updated the fields you want to display, you can read in the new ISFPRMxx member dynamically with the following command

/F SDSF,REFRESH,MEMBER(xx)

The xx refers to the last two digits on your IFAPRMxx member.

Why would we need this?

The main benefit of this feature is that you can control which users are assigned to which groups using SAF.

So you can create custom field layouts that allow users to view only the information they’re permitted to see on an SDSF panel. Or just make a cleaner, less cluttered panel that only has information relevant to your job role.