Criteria Exit Procedure Interface › Criteria Exit Procedures

Criteria Exit Procedures

This chapter describes the criteria exit procedure interface that is available for Common Application Services (CAS) criteria.

Criteria exit procedures are installation-written NCL procedures that are available for performing specialized processing when criteria are built.

Criteria exit procedures are optional. You specify the criteria exit procedure when you define a set of criteria. A criteria exit procedure performs installation-specific criteria processing at defined points during the building of a set of criteria:

• On initialization
• When a user performs one of the following from a run-time criteria panel:
• Press Enter
• Issue the ACTION command
• Issue the EXIT command

You write your own criteria exit procedures by using the variables described in the following sections.

The variables can be divided into two groups as follows:

• The first group of variables provide information to the procedure and are not modifiable (read-only). In particular, you should check the value of &$CROPT to determine the stage of criteria processing for you to implement the required special processing.
• The second group of variables are modifiable and enable the procedure to return information to the system.

You can use your own variables in the criteria exit procedure. However, do not use variable names that start with #CR. The criteria exit procedure is called with NOSHRVARS=(#CR). Once you specify your own variables, these variables are persistent through the different stages of criteria processing. That is, if you specify &A = variable-value, the value of this variable is available on each subsequent call to the procedure.