Encoding management when submitting a job (for site not un EBCDIC IBM-037)

[FALLAI-Denis]

A Job contains technical information such as the JCL, but can also include Data in inline sysins.

This Data is sensitive to the encoding used on the z/OS mainframe system. When sending the Job, this Data must be correctly transcoded.

Use case:

• locally the Job is encoded in UTF-8
• on the z/OS mainframe system, we want the Job, and Data in sysins, to be encoded in EBCDIC IBM-1147 (France)

However, encoding management is not provided for in the processing of Jobs by Zowe CLI (and probably z/OSMF) . It seems to us that the transcoding is done from UTF-8 to EBCDIC IBM-037 (US) or (EBCDIC IBM-1047 ?), which does not suit us.

The same problem arises for the retrieval of reports and outputs produced by the execution of a Job. In our case we must apply a transformation from EBCDIC IBM-1147 to UTF-8 and not from EBCDIC IBM-037 (or EBCDIC IBM-1047) to UTF-8.

[github-actions]

Thank you for raising this issue.
The community has 90 days to upvote 👍 the issue.
If it receives 5 upvotes, we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it.

[t1m0thyj]

This would be a nice enhancement on the z/OS Jobs SDK:

• API to submit a job should support an encoding option to set the "X-IBM-Intrdr-File-Encoding" header
• API to retrieve the contents of a job spool file should support an encoding option to set the "fileEncoding" query parameter

Once the enhancement is made on the SDK, we can also add an --encoding option to the relevant CLI commands.

[FALLAI-Denis]

Hi,

About X-IBM-Intrdr-Mode header of submit job z/OSMF API:

X-IBM-Intrdr-File-Encoding
This optional header specifies that the EBCDIC code page is to be used for encoding the data that is written to the internal reader.
If not specified, the default is IBM-1047. 
This header is ignored when optional header X-IBM-Intrdr-Mode is set to RECORD or BINARY.
This header is effective only when the JCL for the job to be submitted is included in the HTTP request body.
This header is ignored when the job to be submitted resides in a data set or UNIX file.

For spool retrieval, there is no equivalent header. So spool file must be retrieve with a mode=text;fileEncoding=code-page query parameter on the URI.

mode=text;fileEncoding=code-page
Specifies an alternative code page (EBCDIC) for the spool file on z/OS; the encoded text is converted to the client's request encoding. 
If not specified, the default code page is IBM-1047. 

Regarding sites that work with the IBM-037 code-page on MVS (default code-page), I wonder about the conversion problems they may have when submitting a job or when recovering a spool, because we also have to apply a transcoding from IBM-1047 to UTF-8, and I don't think there is any equivalence between IBM-037 and IBM-1047.

[github-actions]

Thank you for raising this enhancement request.
The community has 90 days to vote on it.
If the enhancement receives at least 5 upvotes, it is added to our development backlog.
If it receives fewer votes, the issue is closed.

[awharn]

This change has been staged, and will be available in version 7.25.0 with the --job-encoding IBM-1147 option on the zowe jobs submit local-file and zowe jobs submit stdin commands. For downloading spool files, we also now accept the --encoding option on the download commands.