Creating a trial current plan

About this task

Before you create, extend, or replan the current plan, you can create a trial plan to simulate the effect. A trial plan can reveal potential problems and provide the opportunity to avoid such problems before they affect your business systems. You should make a trial plan before every daily plan extend, this acts as an early-warning system.

To run a trial plan that uses VSAM copies as input, you need to follow these steps:
  1. Run the EQQPCS03 sample to allocate/delete the data sets intended to contain the VSAM copies.
  2. Select the TRIAL option from the DAILY PLANNING menu.
  3. Specify which input data sets should be VSAM copies.

Step 1 can be performed only once. Steps 2 and 3 are repeated each time a trial plan is made.

When a trial plan with VSAM copies selected is made, the submitted job will have, in addition to the normal trial job, a first step that will invoke the EQQDPCOP routine to run the selected VSAM copies. This step will always empty and then refill the previously allocated VSAM (EQQPCS03).

If you want to run several TRIAL plans using already existing VSAM copies obtained in a first TRIAL plan, then you need to:
  • Select YES on the EQQDTTRP panel in the 'Copy VSAM' field.
  • Edit the trial job to be submitted.
  • Manually delete the first step in the job (COPYVSM EXEC PGM=EQQBATCH, PARM='EQQDPCOP').

The skeleton member corresponding to the trial plan is EQQDPTRZ.

When VSAM copies are no longer needed, just run EQQPCS03 and remove the comments from the delete part.

Note: EQQPCS03 has intentionally been kept separate from EQQDPTRZ to avoid repeatedly having to allocate and delete VSAM data sets each time a trial plan is created.

When a trial plan is produced, the plan is not updated, but you get a report.