Overview

IBM Z Open Editor v4 or later features enterprise-level advanced capabilities that cover use cases that go beyond programming and simple accessing of z/OS Resources. You would typically find such features in IBM's commercial zDevOps solutions such as IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition (IDzEE). 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 licenses through IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition or IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS.

To allow every user to try these features, Z Open Editor will activate a 60-day trial license when you start version 4 or 5 for the first time.

Only the following new features documented in this section require such a license:

1. 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.
2. Preprocessor support for COBOL: run a preprocessor either on your local workstation or remotely on z/OS driven with a new ZAPP profile type and then continue editing with full syntax checking (except for the preprocessor statements) and automatically rerunning the preprocessor at save. Compare the preprocessor generated code with your code side-by-side.
3. Dependency Based user build and advanced error reporting: run a build of your COBOL, PL/I, HLASM programs on a remote z/OS system via a simple right-click in Z Open Editor and review information, warning, or error messages issued by the compiler directly in the VS Code Problems view. Z Open Editor achieves this by automatically downloading build logs, parsing them, and then presenting messages in the Problems view with descriptions and error codes. You cen then navigate to warnings and errors in your code with a mouse click in the Problems view to review and fix your issue and then rerun your build.
4. HLASM macros support: Use custom macro resolution in HLASM programs with references to macros in local files. The HLASM editor shows hovers, document links, go to definition, and code completion for macros. This feature works with one to many macro declarations per include file, which is achieved by pre-scanning macro files if they can be found in local ZAPP property groups.

To access these capabilities beyond the trial period, you need to activate them in the Z Open Editor Welcome page. See Activating Advanced Capabilities for details.