About Librarian

Under Librarian, all source is stored within proprietary Librarian master files in a highly compressed format. Individual source modules may be stored and retrieved by name. Multiple master files may be defined and shared among the user groups.

Librarian provides licensed users with programmable access to source modules via the File Access Interface Routines (FAIR) API. This is a read-only interface which permits multiple concurrent access for Mainframe Access threads to browse source members residing in a Librarian master file. During Server initialization, Mainframe Access will attempt to load this interface into memory. If this API interface is available through the standard search order (STEPLIB, JOBLIB, or SYS1.LINKLIB at the customer site) then Librarian services will be offered. Startup initialization messages will indicate if Librarian is available. It is a customer responsibility to provide a suitable STEPLIB concatenation which will allow selection of the desired release and version of the Librarian components.

        //STEPLIB DD DSN=your.MFA30.LOADLIB,DISP=SHR
        //        DD DSN=CAI.LIBR43.CAILIB,DISP=SHR
    

For source additions or updates under Librarian, Mainframe Access will invoke the standard Librarian batch utility AFOLIBR. Access to this utility will be serialized, since Librarian does not support multiple, concurrent access to this service from the same address space. In some cases, a customer may have renamed the Batch Update utility AFOLIBR. If this is the case, the new name at this site must be defined to Mainframe Access as a parameter override.

        MFA_LIBRARIAN_HISTORY=YES           - MFA default
        MFA_LIBRARIAN_UPD_MODULE=LIBRUPD    - site override