Verbs and Built-in Functions › &PPI ALERT

&PPI ALERT

Sends a generic alert.

&PPI ALERT [ OPT={ NONE | ASIS | HEXPACK } ] 
           [ DATA=data |
             VARS=prefix* [ RANGE=(start,end) ] |
             ARGS [ RANGE=(start,end) ] |
             VARS=(list) | MDO=stem ]

Operands:

ALERT

This option of the &PPI verb allows an NCL process to send a generic alert to the PPI ALERT receiver, NETVALRT. The alert must be in NMVT format, including the NMVT header. If the process is not defined using &PPI DEFINE, the sender ID used is #nnnnnn, where nnnnnn is the 6-digit (leading zeros) NCL ID.

OPT={ NONE | ASIS | HEXPACK }

An optional parameter that indicates how the supplied data is to be processed before sending. This operand is only valid when the data is specified using the DATA= operand.

NONE

The default, indicates that the data is to have trailing blanks stripped, but is to otherwise be left alone.

ASIS

Indicates that the data is to be completely left alone. This allows passing binary data in NCL tokens with no alteration.

HEXPACK

Indicates that the data supplied is character-format hexadecimal strings. Each string must contain an even number of hexadecimal characters. The strings are each packed to binary and then abutted together. The resulting binary data is sent as is. For generic alerts, this is the most useful format.

Note: The OPT operand is only valid when the DATA operand is specified.

DATA=data

This operand, if specified, delimits the start of the data to send as the generic alert. The data starts immediately after the DATA= keyword.

If the alert is successfully sent, and NETVALRT is active, &RETCODE will be set to 0. If the alert is queued and NETVALRT is inactive, &RETCODE will be set to 4. Other values indicate an error of some sort. &ZFDBK is inspected to determine the exact PPI return code.

VARS=prefix* [ RANGE=(start,end) ] |ARGS [ RANGE=(start,end) ] VARS=(list)

The contents of the variables or arguments specified are concatenated to form the data which is sent as the generic alert.

MDO=stem

The data within this MDO is sent as the generic alert.