Overview

IBM Z® Open Editor v4 and later features enterprise-level advanced capabilities which cover use cases that go beyond programming and accessing of z/OS® Resources. While the core Z Open Editor experience continues to provide free full language support for COBOL, PL/I, REXX, HLASM, JCL and integrations with Zowe™ Explorer, these advanced capabilities require the purchase of additional components and licenses to activate.

You can purchase the required licenses through IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition, IBM Developer for z/OS Select, or IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS.

All new users of Z Open Editor receive a 90-day evaluation trial for all the advanced capabilities. After the trial period, these capabilities require activation through either an RSE API server connection or imported activation kits, as described in Activating advanced capabilities. Only the following features documented in this section require such a license.

For IBM Developer for z/OS Select customers the advanced features available are

1. Remote Connection Emulator: Open a 3270 emulator hosted on the RSE API server by right-clicking a Zowe Explorer RSE API profile. The emulator opens in either a VS Code panel or an external browser, depending on your preference.
2. z/OS Resources table: An all-new, feature-rich view that extends Zowe Explorer with a sortable table. Gain insights into your jobs, data sets, and UNIX files by listing, filtering, and sorting on many available properties.
3. Data Elements view: Use this view to display information about the data elements in a COBOL or PL/I program, including those from copybooks and include files, in a table that can be sorted and filtered.
4. Program Control Flow Browser: Use this view to display the control flow of a COBOL or PL/I program in an interactive graph.
5. Data Flow Browser for COBOL: Display the data flow of a data element in a COBOL program using an interactive graph. You can use this feature to examine how a data element is populated, modified, or written elsewhere.
6. Preprocessor support for COBOL and PL/I: Run a preprocessor either on a local workstation or remotely on z/OS, driven by a new ZAPP profile type. Continue to edit with full syntax checks except for the preprocessor statements, and automatically rerun the preprocessor each time you save. Compare the preprocessor generated code with the code side-by-side.
7. HLASM macros support: Use custom macro resolution in HLASM programs with references to macros in local files and remote data sets. The HLASM editor provides hovers, document links, go to definition, and code completion for macros. This feature supports one or more macro declarations per include file by pre-scanning macro files, provided they are found in local ZAPP property groups. Remote macros can only be found when using an RSE API connection as your default Zowe Explorer profile.
8. Language Detection for data set members: Use Zowe Explorer with RSE API profiles to detect the programming language of a data set member opened in the editor.

IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition or IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS customers can use in addition to the features above also

1. IBM ZCodeScan: Helps developers scan COBOL program files for best practice violations and security vulnerabilities, and it presents the results in a linter-like format.
2. Dependency Based user build and advanced error reporting: Run a build of COBOL, PL/I, HLASM programs on a remote z/OS system through a right-click in Z Open Editor. Review informational, warning, or error messages issued by the compiler directly in the VS Code Problems view. Z Open Editor automatically downloads the build logs, parses them, and presents the messages in the Problems view with descriptions and error codes. Then navigate to warnings and errors in the code using a mouse, click in the Problems view to identify and resolve issues, and then rerun the build.
3. Agent Mode: Utilize Z Open Editor's MCP (Model Context Protocol) server in an Agent-based AI Chat panel in VS Code, providing it with context and data from your z/OS data sets, files, and jobs through Zowe APIs, as well as Z Open Editor configuration files for troubleshooting your setup.