Tailoring ISPF on a guest machine

I’ve got access to a “production” z/OS machine, and I want to customise ISPF to include my clists, and ISPF panels. How do I do this?

I covered some of the details in Configuring ISPF for new applications.

The first step

The most useful command is ALTLIB

"altlib activate application(exec) dataset ('COLIN.CLIST')" 

This allows you to insert your data set ‘COLIN.CLIST’ at the front of the search chain for EXEC (REXX) commands.

You can use the command ALTLIB DISPLAY. This gave me

Current search order (by DDNAME) is:
Application-level EXEC  DDNAME=SYS00053
System-level EXEC       DDNAME=SYSEXEC
System-level CLIST      DDNAME=SYSPROC

You can now issue commands from the specified dataset.

Note: The ALTLIB only applies to the current ISPF session. If you have multiple ISPF sessions, you will need to do it in each session.
If you create new sessions ( START ) it will inherit from the the current session.

Can I do this automatically?

I can manually issue the ALTLIB command. If the systems programmer adds the following to the TSO logon procedure

/* REXX */ 
trace r 
/* your userid is prefixed to any data set unless you double quote it  */
if (sysdsn('CLIST')  = 'OK') 
then 
do 
  "altlib activate application(exec) dataset (CLIST)" 
  if (sysdsn("CLIST(USERPROF)") = 'OK' ) 
  then "USERPROF" 
end 
return 0 

It will automatically issue the ALTLIB command, if the userid.CLIST data set exists, and it there is a member USERPROF in the data set, it will execute that.

To configure ISPF applications you can use the LIBDEF command. See Configuring ISPF for new applications.