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Status Future consideration
Workspace z/OS
Created by Guest
Created on May 21, 2021

Add a section identifier to the Binder API buffers

This is an enhancement suggestion for the Binder API.

To correlate section level data returned by the Binder API, you need to
match on section names. This is both within a single call and across calls.

Example 1: The IDRL (Language Processor IDR) returns multiple entries per section.
The only way to associate them is via the IDL_RESIDENT structure, which is the
section name. The ESD buffer is another case where there are multiple entries
returned per section.

Example 2: The only field to correlate data from IDRL, IDRU, NAME and ESD data is
the section name.

Matching on section name is fairly easy when section names are only 8 characters
or less. But newer program object modules can have section names that are thousands
of bytes. I've seen modules with 3,000 byte section names.*

With section names that long, it becomes more difficult to correlate the data.

My suggestion is that a future buffer version should include a unique fullword
identifier field to go along with each section name field. For example, a Section
Number. All section names that are the same section would have the same section
number.

The result would mean that when correlating the data between and across API calls,
the programmer just has to match up the Section Number; no need to store and
compare thousand byte variable length strings.

Idea priority Medium