From the ISPF Primary Option Menu, type 2 and press Enter to display the EDIT panel. (Click here to see a typical Editor Entry Panel.)

Edit Entry Panel

Just below the dashed line, and immediately below the centered tile "Edit Entry Panel", you should see "ISPF Library", possibly with the PROJECT, GROUP and TYPE fields already filled in to point to the JCL library that you created.

If not, enter your TSO userid, "HUMBSTUD", and "CNTL" in those three fields. (They will be stored when you leave this panel, and redisplayed the next time that you log on.)

Creating a New Member

As you probably remember, PDS member names contain up to eight alphanumeric/national characters, and must start with a non-numeric character.

On the the Edit Entry Panel, position the cursor to the field after Member, and type a name that conforms to those restrictions, and press Enter, in order to enter text in a new member with that name.

You should see a panel with with a column of dots down the left side for each line of the display, and a much larger blank area to the right which will contain the JCL statements themselves.

The blinking square is a "cursor" that shows where the next character that you type will be placed. You can position that cursor using the keyboard's Tab or arrow keys, or by moving the Windows mouse pointer and right-clicking.

The cursor should be now blinking after the prompt COMMAND ==>, where you can enter ISPF Primary Commands.

But you're probably not ready to enter any of those yet, so using the keyboard and/or mouse pointer, position the blinking that to the spot immediately under the first asterisk in the line that contains the text "******** Top of Data ********" (i.e. on the line below that "Top of Data" line).

That's where you can type the first character of the first line in this member.

With the cursor at that position, type "a", down arrow>, "b", down arrow, "c".

When you press Enter, the displayed area will collapse to contain only those lines into which you have entered characters, and the column of dots will turn into a column of line numbers.

Your screen should now be similar to this one (click here).

You will be using the ISPF Editor to create and edit JCL, and to be accepted by JES, JCL characters must be upper case.

So if the lower case characters that you typed have not been shifted to upper case, you should click here to find out how to get automatic capitalization working. (Without automatic capitalization you'll have to use the shift and/or caps lock keys to ensure that your text is in upper case.)

Try using the cursor and tab keys to move around the input area seeing how the various keys interact: backspace, insert, delete, ...

For now don't type anything into the area of dots to the left (As you'll learn later, that's where you can enter "line commands").

When you are finished entering and modifying text: press F3 to stop editing your new member, and you will again see the the Edit Entry Panel.

Look in the upper right corner and you should see the message "Member (your new name)" saved. That's because the ISPF default action for exiting an edit session is to save the member being edited.

If you now press Enter, without typing a member name, you'll see a Member Selection List for the PDS you are editing, which should include the name of the member that you just created. (Click here to see a sample list.)

Editing an Existing PDS Member

This panel displays the PDS members that are currently in the partitioned dataset that you are editing, one row for each member, under the name of that dataset.

Your own list should contain the name of the member that you just created

To edit the member that you just created position the cursor to the field to the left of a member name, type "s" and press Enter.