Maintaining Entry Source and Source Group Records › The XREF Source Group Record

The XREF Source Group Record

The XREF setting lets you use the XREF Source Group Record (X‑SGP) in place of the Entry Source Group Record (E‑SGP) for grouping sources. Here are considerations:

• You can use masking characters. For example, suppose your site has four departments: payroll, personnel, operations, and programming. All source names begin with the first three letters of the department, such as PAY for payroll and PER for personnel. You could reduce the number of entries in a source group to one using a mask, for example PAY‑.

  However, using masking can increase the time CA ACF2 for VM takes to validate an access attempt. CA ACF2 for VM uses a binary search to locate a source name entry in an unmasked record. However, because of the ability to use source names or masks, CA ACF2 for VM uses a modified sequential search to locate a source name in a masked record. If the masked record contains many source names, CA ACF2 for VM takes longer to process the masked record.

• You can exclude sources from a source group. For example, you might want to grant write access to users in the payroll department who log on at terminals PAY01 through PAY15, but prevent them from writing if they log on from the group terminal, PAY07. You could specify INCLUDE(PAY‑) and EXCLUDE(PAY07) in the X‑SGP record for the PAY source group.
• You can define source groups and sets of source group records separately.
• You can use standard CA ACF2 for VM scope records for X‑SGP records, whereas the E‑SGP records require that you use a pseudo data set name to obtain a scoping function.

Entry records that define single sources (the E‑SRC records) will continue to be supported in future releases of CA ACF2 for VM. An advantage of E‑SGP records is the ability to use the NEWDATA, VERDATA, and OLDDATA parameters to change all records with a particular source entry. For example, suppose an employee moves from the payroll department to the personnel department. If his old source was named PAY57, and his new source was named PER33, you could change every instance of PAY57 to PER33 using a single CHANGE subcommand:

CHANGE LIKE(‑) OLDDATA(PAY57) NEWDATA(PER33)

For more information about X‑SGP records, see the chapter “Maintaining Cross‑Reference Records” chapter.