PAM Management Programming Manual

SPI Programming Considerations for the PAM
Subsystem
PAM Management Programming Manual—142481
3-7
Constructs Involving Multiple Tokens
Field Types
All the field types used by the PAM subsystem are SPI standard field types, so they are
represented by symbolic names of the form ZSPI-DDL-name, where name identifies the
field type. For example, the field type ZSPI-DDL-BOOLEAN represents the Boolean
data type.
Throughout this manual, when a field is described, its field type is given.
Constructs Involving Multiple Tokens
The PAM subsystem supports data lists and error lists as described in the SPI
Programming Manual.
Using SPI to Build Commands and Decode
Responses
The SPI Programming Manual provides information on how to build and send a
command message and how to receive and decode a response message. The SPI
Common Extensions Manual provides additional information specific to data
communications subsystems.
The following subsections provide a summary of the steps that your application must
take to perform the tasks for building and receiving command messages and decoding
the response. A description of the subsystem-specific programming considerations
follows in a summary.
Building and Sending a Command Message
Your application must take the following steps to build and send a command message:
1. Declare a buffer of appropriate size.
2. Call the SSINIT procedure to initialize the command buffer. SSINIT sets the values
of certain header tokens, including the command, the object type, and the target
SSID.
3. Call SSPUT or SSPUTTKN to place the appropriate tokens in the buffer.
4. Send the command message using the mechanism appropriate to your programming
language (for example, a WRITERREAD call in TAL).
The recommended buffer length in bytes for a PAM command is a predefined value with
the symbolic name ZPAM-VAL-BUFLEN.
The PAM subsystem does not support multiple commands in a single request message.
However, most commands accept up to 30 object names in one command, so one
command can affect up to 30 objects. All the objects named in one command must be of
the same object type.
The only tokens that can appear more than once in a PAM command are ZSPI-TKN-
COMMENT, ZCOM-TKN-OBJNAME, and ZCOM-TKN-TRACE-OPT. ZSPI-TKN-