Extending Zowe Explorer

Zowe Explorer provides extension APIs that assist third party extenders to create extensions that access Zowe Explorer resource entities to enrich the user experience. There are many ways Zowe Explorer can be extended to support many different use cases. We, the Zowe Explorer core contributors, have defined APIs, guidelines, as well as formal compliance criteria for three popular ways of extending it, but we encourage you to engage with us to discuss other ways for extensions that you envision that we did not yet consider.

Table of contents:

Kinds of extensions
Getting Started with extending Zowe Explorer
Zowe Explorer extension dependencies and activation
About Zowe CLI profiles
Accessing the Zowe Explorer Extender API
Creating an extension that accesses Zowe Explorer profiles
- Asking the User for Credentials
Creating an extension that adds a data provider
Using the Zowe Explorer ProfilesCache for an extender's own unrelated profiles
Creating an extension that adds menu commands

Kinds of extensions

The following kinds of extensions can be certified as compliant for Zowe Explorer. See the v2 Conformance Criteria for the specific criteria. This document will deep dive into several of these to give extenders more guidance and examples.

One extension offering needs to comply with at least one of these kinds, but it can also be in several or all of the kinds listed. In addition to fulfilling all the required criteria for at least one kind (1 to 3), the candidate extension also needs to fulfill the required criteria of the (0) General category.

General extension. A generic VS Code extension that utilizes Zowe Explorer resources in any way.
Profiles access: An extension that accesses the Zowe Explorer Zowe CLI profiles caches for read or write operations.
Data Provider: An extension that provides an alternative Zowe CLI profile type for a different z/OS communication protocol for one or more Zowe Explorer views. The Zowe Explorer FTP Extension that is part of this repository is an example for a Data Provider.
Menus: An extension that injects new menus into the existing Zowe Explorer tree views accessing contextual information from the tree nodes.

Getting Started with extending Zowe Explorer

Extender packages are created as new VS Code extensions. For general information about VS Code extensions, visit the following links:

It is also recommended to set-up a development environment for Zowe Explorer itself following the instructions in Developer Setup to learn its codebase and study the extensibility API's implementations.

The Zowe Explorer API package provided in this GitHub repository is comprised of three sub-packages for different use cases. Modules from these sub-packages will be used in the description of the various extension cases below:

profiles: Contains the API declarations as well as an implementation for an in-memory Zowe CLI profiles cache. All modules in this folder have been written completely independent of VS Code and can therefore be reused also in other NPM packages such as Zowe CLI plugins.
tree: Contains VS Code-specific APIs such as the interfaces used to overlay the VS Code tree views with additional Zowe Explorer data. These interfaces can be used to navigate the Zowe Explorer tree views for the implementation of extensions that implement additional menus and operations.
security: Contains VS Code-specific API for initializing and accessing the secure credentials store used by Zowe.

Zowe Explorer extension dependencies and activation

Although not required for all types of Zowe Explorer extensions, when creating an extension for Zowe Explorer it is in many cases necessary to specify a dependency in the package.json file of the Zowe Explorer extension:

"extensionDependencies": [
    "zowe.vscode-extension-for-zowe"
],

This dependency has then two important effects:

It will enforce that Zowe Explorer is a pre-requisite package for the Zowe Explorer extension, which will automatically co-install Zowe Explorer if it is not yet present when the Zowe Explorer extension is installed.
It will enforce that Zowe Explorer is activated first at startup before the dependent Zowe Explorer extension. This ensures that important data structures related to the extensibility API have been properly initialized and can be called in the activation of the Zowe Explorer extensions own activation.

About Zowe CLI profiles

Zowe Explorer's main capability is to provide access to z/OS resources in MVS, USS, JES as well as execution of various commands such as TSO commands. To realize these interactions it builds on Zowe CLI. One could say that Zowe Explorer provides a graphical user interface for most of the core Zowe CLI commands in form of tree view navigators, menus and pop-up dialogs. The core concept that defines a connection to z/OS in Zowe CLI is the profile. Profiles are created for different interaction protocols such as z/OSMF or FTP and stored for the current user in a location defined by Zowe CLI. Zowe Explorer accesses this same profile store.

A Zowe Explorer extension can also access this profiles store via Zowe Explorer APIs, as well as extend the profiles store with new types of profiles for supporting new or alternative interaction protocols.

In case a new profile type is provided it is a recommended practice, but not required, to also provide a Zowe CLI plugin for this new profile type that implements the capabilities provided by the new profile type, which then can be reused when writing the Zowe Explorer extension. A Zowe CLI plugin is just a normal npm package that can be imported into VS Code extensions for reuse to enable code sharing between CLI plugin and VS Code extension. However, when such a Zowe CLI Plugin is provided by the extender the Zowe Explorer VS Code extension must not make the assumption that this Plugin is actually installed on the user's machine. All the code for creating and using the profile needs to be included into the VS Code extension to allow using it on development machines that did not install Zowe CLI as well.

In other words the extension must be fully self-contained including all the code of the Zowe CLI Plugin that implements the new profile. This will not only simplify the end user experience, but also ensures that the extension can run in other VS Code compatible environments such as Cloud IDEs such as Eclipse Che that might or might not come with a sidecar that provide Zowe CLI. To test this requirement a user shall be able start the extension and use it without having Nodejs and Zowe CLI installed locally. Zowe Explorer provides APIs to call that ensure that the users can store and access new profile types in the Zowe home directory folders as well as the common secure credentials store, which should be utilized by the Zowe Explorer extensions as well.

Accessing the Zowe Explorer Extender API

To create a VS Code extension that accesses the Zowe Explorer API you need to

define a VS Code extension dependency as described above to ensure Zowe Explorer API gets activated and initialized before your extension and
define an NPM dependency to the Zowe Explorer API in your VS Code extension's package.json file to get access to Typescript type definitions provided for the API:

"dependencies": {
    "@zowe/zowe-explorer-api": "1.16.1"
}

Then you will be able to get access to initialized Zowe Explorer API objects provided by VS Code during or after activation. The following code snippet shows how to gain access:

export function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {
  // this is the main operation to call to retrieve the ZoweExplorerApi.IApiRegisterClient object
  // use the optional parameter to constrain the version or newer of Zowe Explorer your extension is supporting
  const zoweExplorerApi = ZoweVsCodeExtension.getZoweExplorerApi("1.16.1");
  if (zoweExplorerApi) {
    // access the API such as registering new API implementations
    // <your code here>
    return true;
  }
  void vscode.window.showInformationMessage("Zowe Explorer was not found: Notify the user with a message.");
  return false;
}

Once you have access to the ZoweExplorerApi.IApiRegisterClient instance returned by the call shown above you have access to various methods. Check all the declarations in the interface specification in the source code.

Most of the operations listed are needed for registering new implementations of a new data provider as described further below in the Section Creating an extension that adds a data provider.

The operation IApiRegisterClient.getExplorerExtenderApi(): IApiExplorerExtender will give you access to profiles as documented in the next section.

Creating an extension that accesses Zowe Explorer profiles

A Zowe CLI profiles access extension is a Zowe Explorer extension that uses the Zowe Extensibility API to conveniently access Zowe CLI profiles loaded by Zowe Explorer itself. This allows the extension to consistently access profile instances of specific types, offer them for edit and updates as well as common refresh operations that apply to all extensions, add more profile types it is using itself for its own custom views (for example a CICS extension adding a CICS explorer view) and other similar use cases related to Zowe CLI profiles. These extensions do not have to be VS Code extension if it just wants to use ProfilesCache implementation of Zowe Explorer as all APIs are provided free of any VS Code dependencies. Such an extension could be used for another non-VS Code tool, a Zowe CLI plugin, a Web Server or another technology. However, to access the profiles cache of the actual running VS Code Zowe Explorer the extender needs to be a VS Code extension that has an extension dependency defined to be able to query the extender APIs. Therefore, some of the criteria that are listed here as required are only required if the extender is a VS Code extension.

When creating such an extension you need to follow the steps described above for accessing the Zowe Explorer API. Then by calling the getExplorerExtenderApi() operation on the returned object you have access to various operations on profiles. See the ZoweExplorerExtender.ts file in the main zowe-explorer package for details on the implementation of the various operations.

The currently provided operations initialize the user's profiles directory with any new profile types provided by the extender, trigger a reload from disk to pick up any newly registered profile types and external user changes (for example, after the user adds/updates profiles via Zowe CLI), as well as provide full access to all currently loaded profiles available in Zowe Explorer.

initForZowe(profileType: string, profileTypeConfigurations: ICommandProfileTypeConfiguration[]): Promise<void>
reloadProfiles(): Promise<void>
getProfilesCache(): ProfilesCache

Here is a simple example for loading and navigating the available profiles by type.

// Retrieve the Zowe Explorer API object from the currently running instance.
// It must be at least Zowe Explorer 1.18.0 or newer or undefined will returned.
const zoweExplorerApi = ZoweVsCodeExtension.getZoweExplorerApi("1.18.0");
if (zoweExplorerApi) {
  // Initialized the users ~/.zowe directory with the metadata for FTP profiles in case
  // the user does not have the FTP CLI Plugin installed and profiles created, yet.
  const meta = await CoreUtils.getProfileMeta();
  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().initForZowe("zftp", meta);
  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().reloadProfiles();

  // Get the IApiExplorerExtender instance from the API that extenders can used
  // to interact with Zowe Explorer such as accessing all the loaded profiles
  const profilesCache = zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().getProfilesCache();

  // Example for iterating over the profiles loaded by Zowe Explorer by type
  const allProfileTypes = profilesCache.getAllTypes();
  let message = "Found the following available profiles: ";
  if (!allProfileTypes) {
    message += "none.";
  } else {
    for (const profileType of allProfileTypes) {
      const profileNames = await profilesCache.getNamesForType(profileType);
      message += `${profileType}: ${JSON.stringify(profileNames)} `;
    }
  }
  void vscode.window.showInformationMessage(message);
}

Asking the User for Credentials

A Zowe Explorer extension that uses the Zowe Explorer profiles may need to ask the user for credentials in order to perform certain actions against the service. It is possible for the Zowe CLI profiles and the Zowe Explorer profiles to not contain sensitive information like user and password, thus the need to prompt for them. In order to standardize on how extenders may ask for credentials, the Zowe Explorer exposes a ZoweVsCodeExtension.updateCredentials API via the Zowe Explorer API NPM package. Said function allows for customization (e.g. internationalization) by accepting a vscode.InputBoxOptions object for the user and the password input boxes that will be presented to end-users.

For an example on how to use the updateCredentials() API, see the Profiles.ts#promptCredentials(...) function.

Note: The promptCredentials() API will default to the English language if no customization is provided.

Creating an extension that adds a data provider

A data provider Zowe Explorer extension is a VS Code extension that accesses Zowe Explorer profiles as well as provides an alternative protocol for Zowe Explorer to interact with z/OS. The default protocol Zowe Explorer uses is the z/OSMF REST APIs and data provider adds support for another API. For example, the Zowe Explorer extension for zFTP, which is maintained by the Zowe Explorer squad is an example for a Zowe Explorer data provider extension that uses FTP instead of z/OSMF for all of its USS and MVS interactions. To achieve such an extension it uses a Zowe CLI Plugin for FTP that implemented the core interactions and provided them as an SDK. The CLI also defined a new Zowe CLI profile type (zftp) that is used to identify and register the new data provider implementations.

To implement as data provider Zowe Explorer extension you need to

Implement at least one of the four available interfaces used by the API for data providers (IUss, IMvs, IJes, ICommand) as well as the ICommon interface as specified in ZoweExplorerApi.ts. The new implementation must be using a new Zowe CLI profile type name for identification.
Register your API implementation with the IApiRegisterClient returned by Zowe Explorer during activation of your VS Code extension as shown below.
Initialize the user's .zowe directory with meta-data for the new profile type.

const zoweExplorerApi = ZoweVsCodeExtension.getZoweExplorerApi("1.17.0");
if (zoweExplorerApi) {
  // Register new implementations of data provider using FTP for three Zowe Explorer views
  zoweExplorerApi.registerUssApi(new FtpUssApi());
  zoweExplorerApi.registerMvsApi(new FtpMvsApi());
  zoweExplorerApi.registerJesApi(new FtpJesApi());

  // Initialized the users ~/.zowe directory with the metadata for FTP profiles in case
  // the user does not have the FTP CLI Plugin installed and profiles created, yet.
  const meta: ICommandProfileTypeConfiguration[] = await CoreUtils.getProfileMeta();

  // The above `meta` is of type ICommandProfileTypeConfiguration[] from the `@zowe/imperative` package.
  // When calling the `CoreUtils.getProfileMeta()`, the FTP plug-in returns the following profile configuration
  /*
    [
      {
        type: "zftp",
        createProfileExamples: [{
          options: "myprofile -u ibmuser -p ibmp4ss -H sys123",
          description: "Create a zftp profile called 'myprofile' ..."
        }],
        schema: {
          type: "object",
          title: "Configuration profile for z/OS FTP",
          description: "Configuration profile for z/OS FTP",
          properties: {
            host: {
              type: "string",
              optionDefinition: {
                type: "string",
                name: "host", aliases: ["H"],
                description: "The hostname ...",
                group: "FTP Connection options"
              }
            },
            port: {
              type: "number",
              optionDefinition: { <similar structure as host.optionDefinition> },
              includeInTemplate: true
            },
            user: {
              type: "string",
              optionDefinition: { <similar structure as host.optionDefinition> },
              secure: true
            },
            password: {
              type: "string",
              optionDefinition: { <similar structure as host.optionDefinition> },
              secure: true
            },
            ...
            { <other properties with a similar structure> }
            ...
          },
          optional: ["host", "port", "user", "password", ...],
        },
      },
    ]
  */

  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().initForZowe("zftp", meta);
  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().reloadProfiles();
}

The FTP Zowe Explorer extension provides examples for providing a data provider for the FTP protocol. The extension provides data providers for USS, MVS, as well as JES. There are three modules in the source code that implement the required operations of the Zowe Explorer API for each view in the packages/zowe-explorer-ftp-extension/src folder:

These are parallel implementations of the same operations that are provided by Zowe Explorer itself using the z/OSMF interaction protocol. You can find that implementation for reference in the file packages/zowe-explorer-api/src/profiles/ZoweExplorerZosmfApi.ts.

Using the Zowe Explorer ProfilesCache for an extender's own unrelated profiles

The previous two sections outlined how extenders can access the cached profiles of Zowe Explorer and provide new profile types for a new data provider for any of the three Zowe Explorer tree views. Another use case would be that a Zowe Explorer extender does not add a new data provider to Zowe Explorer, but instead adds a new fourth (or more) tree view(s) showing data from a different data source that is not Data Sets, USS, or Jobs. The extender would still want to use the same ProfilesCache as Zowe Explorer to be able to react to the same refresh operations - for example, when the user clicks the Refresh View button in any of the tree views, all profiles including the custom ones should be reloaded.

To support the Zowe Explorer profiles cache that extenders can access as described above, Zowe Explorer API offers registerCustomProfilesType(), a register method that allows adding a profile type to the cache that is not associated with any of the three APIs listed above. Note, that the profile type must be a valid Zowe CLI profile type that is installed on the end user's home directory. The extension needs to therefore make sure it called the initForZowe() before trying to register a custom type.

The following example uses the registerCustomProfilesType() method to register Zowe CICS (cics) profiles as a custom profile type:

// Retrieve the Zowe Explorer API object from the currently running instance.
// It must be at least Zowe Explorer 1.18.0 or newer or undefined will returned.
const zoweExplorerApi = ZoweVsCodeExtension.getZoweExplorerApi("1.18.0");
if (zoweExplorerApi) {
  // Initialized the users ~/.zowe directory with the metadata for CICS profiles in case
  // the user does not have the CICS CLI Plugin installed and profiles created, yet.
  const meta = await CoreUtils.getProfileMeta();
  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().initForZowe("cics", meta);

  // Get the IApiExplorerExtender instance from the API that extenders can used
  // to interact with Zowe Explorer such as accessing all the loaded profiles
  const profilesCache = zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().getProfilesCache();

  // Important that this method is called after initForZowe() to avoid an exception
  profilesCache.registerCustomProfilesType("cics");
  // Explicit reload is required as registering does not do it automatically
  await zoweExplorerApi.getExplorerExtenderApi().reloadProfiles();

  // some examples for access the profiles loaded for cics from disk
  const defaultCicsProfile = profilesCache.getDefaultProfile("cics");
  const profileNames = await profilesCache.getNamesForType("cics");
  const firstProfile = profilesCache.loadNamedProfile(profileNames[0]);
}

Creating an extension that adds menu commands

A Zowe Explorer menu extension contributes additional commands to Zowe Explorer's existing menus in VS Code. Typically, these are contributions to the right-click context menus associated with items in one or more of Zowe Explorer's three tree views (Data Sets, USS, and Jobs). VS Code extensions can define and use commands in the contributes section of their package.json as described in VS Code's command contribution documentation. Extenders should ensure that command values they define here do not begin the prefix zowe., which is reserved for Zowe Explorer commands.

Contextual hooks

By setting the when property of a command to match the views and context values used by Zowe Explorer, a menu extension can hook into and add commands into Zowe Explorer's existing menus.

To specify which view a command contribution should appear in, Zowe Explorer menu extenders can use view == <zowe.viewId>, where <zowe.viewId> is one of the following view IDs used by Zowe Explorer:

Data Sets view: zowe.ds.explorer
USS view: zowe.uss.explorer
Jobs view: zowe.jobs.explorer

To allow for more granular control over which type(s) of tree items a command should be associated with (for example, a USS textfile versus a USS directory), Zowe Explorer uses a strategy of adding and removing context components for an individual Tree Item's context value if that imparts additional information that could assist with menu triggers. Extenders can leverage this when defining a command's when property by specifying viewItem =~ <contextValue>, where <contextValue> is a regular expression that matches the context value of the target Tree Item type(s). Examples of available context components can be found in Zowe Explorer's globals.ts file, as values for exported constants whose names contain CONTEXT.

For more information on how to use a command's when property, see the VS Code when clause contexts documentation.

In the example below, we are referencing the Jobs view, and more specifically, a Job type tree item that has additional information indicated by the _rc context. This can be used by an extender to trigger a specific menu.

  "menus": {
    "view/item/context": [
      {
        "when": "view == zowe.jobs.explorer && viewItem =~ /^job.*/ && viewItem =~ /^.*_rc=CC.*/",
        "command": "testmule.retcode",
        "group": "104_testmule_workspace"
      }
          ],
      ...
      ...
  }

Notice the syntax we use for the context value (or viewItem) above is a regular expression as denoted by the =~ equal test. Using regular expressions to describe context allows more meaning to be embedded in the context.

Grouping menu commands

Extenders can define command groups separated by dividers in VS Code's right-click context menus by using the group property for items in contributes.menus.view/item/context of their package.json. Zowe Explorer prefixes its menu command group values with 0##_zowe_, where 0## represents numbers 000 - 099. Thus, extenders should avoid using 0##_zowe_ at the beginning of any group values they assign for menu commands. Any command groups contributed by extenders should be located below Zowe Explorer's command groups whenever they appear together in the same context menu. This helps keep the core Zowe Explorer context menu commands in a uniform location for users. A recommended extender menu command group naming convention would be to prefix the extender's group values with 1##_extensionName_.

Accessing Zowe Explorer tree item information

When adding a command to the right-click context menu of an item in Zowe Explorer's Data Sets, USS, or Jobs tree view, extenders may want to access information specific to that item (or "node"). This can be done by importing that item's node type, and then specifying that same node type when defining the node as a parameter for the command's callback function.

In the basic example below, the extender imports IZoweTreeNode from Zowe Explorer's API, and then registers the command testmule.nodeInfoTest with the callback function nodeInfoTest(). In the function definition for nodeInfoTest(), the node parameter is listed with IZoweTreeNode as its type. This allows the extender to access IZoweTreeNode's getLabel() method for the node. (In this case, the VS Code extension simply displays the node's label as an information message.)

// Import the node type from Zowe Explorer API
import { IZoweTreeNode, ZoweVsCodeExtension } from "@zowe/zowe-explorer-api";

export function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {
  ... // Other registration/activation code ...

  // Register the command with the callback function
  context.subscriptions.push(vscode.commands.registerCommand("testmule.nodeInfoTest", (node) => nodeInfoTest(node)));
}

// Declare the node type when defining the node as a parameter for the function
async function nodeInfoTest(node: IZoweTreeNode): Promise<void> {
  await vscode.window.showInformationMessage(node.getLabel());
}

IZoweTreeNode is a general Zowe Explorer tree node type that is not specific to any particular view. To access view-specific properties and methods for nodes in the Data Sets, USS, or Jobs view, extenders can also import the node type specific to that view.

The node types for items in each of Zowe Explorer's three tree views are as follows:

Data Sets View items: IZoweDatasetTreeNode
USS View items: IZoweUSSTreeNode
Jobs View items: IZoweJobTreeNode

The following example shows a more complex use case in the Data Sets view with the IZoweDatasetTreeNode node type. In this scenario, the extender wishes to implement a command that allows the user to select a partitioned data set (PDS) or PDS member, and then create a test PDS with members based on the selected PDS or PDS member. The code sample below supports the following specifications:

If the user selects the command from the right-click context menu of an existing PDS, a new test PDS should be created with the same number of members as the selected PDS. The names of the new test PDS and its members should be based on the name of the selected PDS and its members.
If the user selects the command from the right-click context menu of a PDS member, then the new test PDS should be created with only one member. The names of the new test PDS member and test PDS should be based on the names of the selected PDS member and its parent PDS, respectively.

To implement the functionality described above, the extender registers the command testmule.createTestPdsFromSelection with the callback function createTestPdsFromSelection(). In the function definition for createTestPdsFromSelection(), the node parameter is listed with IZoweDatasetTreeNode as its type. This allows the extender to access IZoweDatasetTreeNode's properties and methods for the node. This example uses the node's contextValue property, and accesses its getParent(), getLabel(), getChildren(), and getProfile() methods.

// Import the data set node type from Zowe Explorer API
import { IZoweDatasetTreeNode, ZoweVsCodeExtension } from "@zowe/zowe-explorer-api";
import { IProfileLoaded } from "@zowe/imperative"; // (Imported from Zowe Imperative to allow working with Zowe profiles)

export function activate(context: vscode.ExtensionContext) {
    ... // Other registration/activation code ...

    // Register the command testmule.createTestPdsFromSelection with the callback function createTestPdsFromSelection()
    context.subscriptions.push(
        vscode.commands.registerCommand("testmule.createTestPdsFromSelection", (node) =>
            createTestPdsFromSelection(node)
        )
    );
}

/**
 * The `createTestPdsFromSelection()` function creates a test PDS with members based on the selected PDS or PDS member node.
 *
 * @param {IZoweDatasetTreeNode} node The selected PDS or PDS member node
 */
async function createTestPdsFromSelection(node: IZoweDatasetTreeNode): Promise<void> {
    // Initialize variables
    let pdsNode: IZoweDatasetTreeNode; // The existing PDS node to be used as a basis for creating the test PDS
    let newPdsMemberNames: string[] = []; // An array of member names to be used by the new test PDS

    // Get the selected node's context value
    const nodeContext = node.contextValue;
    if (!nodeContext) {
        return; // Exit if nodeContext is undefined
    }
    // Use the context value to check if the selected node is a PDS or a PDS member.
    // Each RegExp(ABC).test(XYZ) returns true if regex pattern ABC matches XYZ, and returns false otherwise.
    // (In the future, such context value parsing will be added to Zowe Explorer's API.)
    const isPds = new RegExp("^(pds)").test(nodeContext); // Check if the selected node is a PDS.
    const isPdsMember = new RegExp("^(member)").test(nodeContext); // Check if the selected node is a PDS member.
    if (!isPds && !isPdsMember) {
        return; // Exit if selected node is not a PDS or PDS member
    }

    // Depending on if a PDS member versus a PDS was selected, get the relevant PDS node to base the test PDS on.
    // Then, add the relevant PDS member name(s) to the array of names to be used by the new PDS.
    if (isPdsMember) {
        pdsNode = node.getParent(); // If selected node is a PDS member, get its parent PDS node.
        newPdsMemberNames.push(node.getLabel()); // Add the label of the selected PDS member to the array of names.
    } else {
        pdsNode = node; // The relevant PDS node is the selected PDS node.
        const pdsChildren = await node.getChildren(); // Get the members belonging to the PDS.
        newPdsMemberNames = pdsChildren.map((pdsChild) => {
            return pdsChild.getLabel(); // Add the labels for all members of the selected PDS to the array of names.
        });
    }

    // Get the label for the relevant PDS node. (The name of the new test PDS will be based on this.)
    const pdsNodeLabel = pdsNode.getLabel();

    // Get the relevant PDS node's profile, which has connection information.
    // This is needed to communicate with the z/OS back end when creating the new test PDS and its member(s).)
    const pdsProfile = pdsNode.getProfile();

    // Run the function to create a test PDS and member(s) using values obtained from the selected node.
    await createTestPds(pdsNodeLabel, pdsProfile, newPdsMemberNames);
}

/**
 * The `createTestPds()` function creates a test PDS with zero or more members.
 *
 * @param {string} pdsName A string that will be used as the basis for naming the test PDS
 * @param {IProfileLoaded} profile A profile with connection information to interact with the z/OS server
 * @param {string[]} pdsMemberNames An array of member names to be used by the new test PDS
 */
async function createTestPds(pdsName: string, profile: IProfileLoaded, pdsMemberNames: string[]): Promise<void> {
   ... // Extender code for creating a test PDS with zero or more members ...
}

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